Google tools for customizing searches

https://cardcatalogforlife.substack.com/p/google-has-a-secret-reference-desk

by maxutility • 3 months ago

79 20 3 months ago

cardcatalogforlife.substack.com

CamperBob2• 3 months ago

FWIW, this article isn't your usual substack slop. There are some Googling tricks and techniques here that I've never seen documented elsewhere, such as AROUND(n).

nightpool• 3 months ago

Is the AROUND(n) one real? I've never seen it before, and trying "climate AROUND(3) policy" as mentioned in the article just gives me results where "Around 3" is in the body:

European Central Bank Climate, Nature and Monetary Policy 1 day ago — ECB research has found that four years after a drought or flood, regional output remains depressed by around 3 percentage points on average

(compared to e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=climate+policy+ecb) which has the same result but does not show the "around 3 percentage points" snippet

Ariarule• 3 months ago

There used to be a professional layer between most people and raw information. Librarians, researchers, editors, fact-checkers: people whose entire job was to understand how information was organized, who produced it, what motivated them, and where the gaps were in any given source. You didn’t need to think much about any of that, because someone else already had.
That layer has largely dissolved. Search engines replaced the card catalog, algorithms replaced the reference interview, and AI summaries are now stepping in where a librarian’s judgment about source quality used to sit. What’s been left in place of all that professional mediation is a search bar and the assumption that you’ll figure it out. - https://cardcatalogforlife.substack.com/i/188856309/the-skil...

An unfortunate conclusion that smuggles in unwarranted good-old-days nostalgia to an otherwise excellent overview. The previous system that they're describing had serious problems, limited access to raw data compared to now, and could not have scaled up to the level of access to information that the internet provides.

The information environment prior to the early 2000s was quite terrible. We shouldn't pretend this was a golden age of truth-oriented gatekeeping, although there were certainly gatekeepers. There were a lot of misconceptions, errors, and unchecked biases on dead trees and in late 90s databases. The idea that those librarians, researchers, editors, fact-checkers were aligned with anything you might care about is also unsupported and dubious.

azalemeth• 3 months ago

I distinctly remember being an 8 year old in primary school and not being believed by a teacher that tungsten existed. I was told I must be wrong about the density of this metal being higher than lead and unless I could find a book to prove it I should shut up about it. In reality I'd been to a museum and learnt all about wonderful wulfram and probably just must have been insufferable.

Wikipedia is a godsend.

maxutility• 3 months ago

lots of useful Google search tricks and syntax all in one place. I already knew many of these. But verbatim mode is new to me and addresses a major complaint I’ve had about increasingly fuzzy semantic search.

AlecSchueler• 3 months ago

Wrapping a phrase in quotation marks forces Google to find pages where those exact words appear in that exact order.

This hasn't been the case for at least five years surely?

jonathanlydall3• 3 months ago

Maybe it needs that verbatim option?

shevy-java3• 3 months ago

I found that Google ignores it for the most part.

I also think that behaviour kind of came from youtube. For videos it makes a tiny bit more sense to ignore what the person wanted. For google search it makes no sense, and this is one of many more reasons why I think Google must be disbanded.

cj• 3 months ago

15-20 years. Maybe longer.

invalidSyntax• 3 months ago

It works some time. The problem is that you need it to actually search what you want, and it just ignores it every now and then.

jonathanlydall3• 3 months ago

That verbatim option looks like it might be a way to largely bring back the old Google which tended to work quite well for me (except that modern SEO spam means we can probably never have the old Google again).

I’ve been pissed off with Google for (10+?) years now, ever since it became apparent to me that they changed their search from returning what you queried to some kind of fuzzy guess at what they think you’re looking for (probably based on what average, ie, non technical, people look for).

Possibly that verbatim option puts it back to what used to work pretty well for me, but because they changed it without really saying and then made the option for the old behaviour hidden away with an obtuse name, I had no idea about it until reading this article and had largely written them off as being more interested in showing adverts than what I was actually looking for.

Once I discovered that ChatGPT and similar are almost always way better at finding what I was actually looking for than Google ever was, Google is now very far from my first choice of search service.

It also helps that LLMs tend to be very good at helping you find the correct term, project, technology name, etc, for something when you’re not sure up front of what term to search for exactly.

adaptbrian• 3 months ago

Modern day seo spam is attributed to Google dumping page rank in American serps starting back in 2018. Brands were propped up by signals others can't emulate and the smart seos realized it was a fools errand to work anywhere except in house at said brands so they could continue to easily spam and not get noticed, collect easy pay checks and sit on hacker news all day.

This take is so tiring to read on HN. GOOG won the FUD WAR with Russias misinfo playbook.

Ohh yea. E-a-e-t.

GOOG doesn't track clicks either..........

jonathanlydall3• 3 months ago

Well whatever the cause, SEO spam means that searching for anything generally popular returns pages and pages of results to sites with low depth content and no real substance.

I realized this when I was curious to know when a TV show’s next season may start and all the search results were useless fluff articles, even though their titles looked promising.

In conjunction with my having concluded some time prior that they had generally switched their search (for example when searching for software development stuff) to seemingly always assume I was actually searching for something else, made me convinced that Google had become quite useless.

shevy-java3• 3 months ago

Once I discovered that ChatGPT and similar are almost always way better at finding what I was actually looking for than Google ever was, Google is now very far from my first choice of search service.

I found that all of them really suck nowadays. AI also hallucinates and lies to me, which means they waste my time. Wikipedia is still ok but the AI Skynet crap is constantly attacking it, trying to erode its quality.

shevy-java3• 3 months ago

A 2024 study by SparkToro found that nearly 60% of Google searches end without anyone clicking through to a website, and the trend has accelerated since. By February 2026, Ahrefs found that queries triggering AI Overviews now see a 58% reduction in clicks.

I disable the AI spam by Google, but even doing so still does not help uncripple what Google ruined here. Google search is next to useless now - and that was a deliberate change by Google. Oddly enough, the alternative search engines also suck, so I don't blame Google for everything - just the majority part of suckage here.

We need a new search engine. Google failed us here. AdCompanies always fail. Google committed to an ads only company.

jeromechoo• 3 months ago

This is a fantastic resource. The author only briefly covers library databases, but there's so much more in structured querying that could be worth covering.

For example, you can use Sparql to perform structured queries on Wikidata (a structured database version of Wikipedia) to get well beyond unstructured documents.

Here's every person in Wikibase that was born in NYC: https://query.wikidata.org/#%23Humans%20born%20in%20New%20Yo...

adrithmetiqa• 3 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Hacks

cachius• 3 months ago

Guess how that library from the photo looks from outside...

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadtbibliothek_am_Mail%C3%A4n...

cadamsdotcom• 2 months ago

A great resource - I decided hey, I’ll definitely forget this stuff so why not turn it into a tool for myself:

Can you read https://cardcatalogforlife.substack.com/p/google-has-a-secre... and create a single file html tool (browser only, no backend) that lets users construct a Google search and jump to google with their query, helping them make use of the features mentioned when building up their query?

mixedcaseSnake• 2 months ago

I use UDM14 (I don't like using or seeing AI anymore, and I've even tried to quit AI, which now that I think about it, I quit it now. I do not use AI anymore), and I also use quotation marks to search mostly everything I like, because without them I get irrelevant articles. I don't want to see a random website unrelated to the topic at hand, e.g. if I was searching "hockey" or "baseball" I don't want unrelated news. Works best with my language English, not so with agglutinative languages.

Google tools for customizing searches

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