[kwlug-disc] Search engine that actually searches for strings

[Paul Nijjar]

Now it seems to highlight bible unless I quote it (on DuckDuckGo).

If I quote multiple things it feels free to ignore the terms I care
about most.

wordpress.org "verbum" "comment form" -"bible"

gives me 
https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/comment_form/
https://wordpress.org/documentation/article/comments-in-wordpress/

as the top two results. (Note that I am trying wordpress.org and not
wordpress.com here). Neither of these top two results appears to
contain the string "verbum". 

This string must exist someplace, although maybe only as a substring.
(I am pretty sure I have seen this phenomenon even when searching for
standalone phrases.) It is being generated in the wordpress.com source
code somehow. So I guess I have to find the source code. Why isn't any
search engine willing to show me the source code repo?

I guess I am just too dumb to know how to use a search engine in 2023.
It is natural to blame the victim here, but I don't think my
expectation that "If I quote something then make sure it is in the
search results" is all that unreasonable. 

I do not have documented evidence of this, but I feel that sometimes
if I appease the search engine gods somehow I will get subsequent
search results that DO contain the string, which means the string
exists in the search engine indices, but won't give me pages with
those strings when I ask for them directly.



- Paul


On Thu, Sep 21, 2023 at 05:11:21AM -0400, John Steel wrote:
> I searched duck duck go with that query and initially it was including bible (and highlighting it like I wanted to see it) but when I replaced the minus character it worked. Maybe somewhere along the line it was changed to a Unicode character? I also do see verbum in the results. 
> 
> On Wed, Sep 20, 2023, at 11:19 PM, Paul Nijjar via kwlug-disc wrote:
> > I don't know what happened to search engines, but they are getting
> > worse and worse and I am getting more and more annoyed.
> > 
> > wordpress.com recently changed its comment form. You used to be able
> > to enter in an email and name without Javascript, and you could submit
> > a comment. Now they have changed to something that uses the string
> > "verbum" in its class names. I want to know what this is so I can turn
> > it off. So I search for something like
> > 
> > wordpress.com comment form "verbum" -bible
> > 
> > (since there is some bible site that pollutes the results).
> > 
> > When I search on DuckDuckGo or Google or Bing, none of the search
> > results contain the string "verbum", even though in all three putting
> > the terms in scare quotes is supposed to search for the exact phrase.
> > This happens all the time. I try to search for exact strings and get
> > nonsense. I am so tired of it. Is there a search engine I can use that
> > will actually find pages containing the strings I am searching for? If
> > so what is it?
> > 
> > - Paul
> > 
> > 
> > -- 
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-- 
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Housing: https://unionsd.coop
Blog: http://pnijjar.freeshell.org