Can anybody

[commodorified]

1) confirm that blindingly virulent rage is a perfectly reasonable response when you type in an advanced search with limiters and alternate spellings and careful selection of AND and OR and the database says "we recognize that you took three minutes filling up that search page to your exact specs but actually we were always planning to shit every result that contains the name charles onto your unprotected head in no particular order because we assume our users are stupid and don't know what they want"?

2) Commend to me a search engine that will not do that?

3) Find me somebody to love?
(I'm fine actually but it does make a cheering earworm, no?)

Comments

[redbird]

Entirely reasonable, and I'm tracking this entry in hopes someone else can answer the second question.

[kaberett]

YES IT IS A REASONABLE RESPONSE.

[curgoth]

My kingdom for fully formed SQL queries.

[antisoppist]

Damn, everyone else is also here because they don't know where to find this either?

I am a translator. I used to use advanced search in different country-specific versions of AltaVista and early Google to find parallel terminology and now it's all gone to shit because search engines think I only want to know about things near where I live, not for actual research about how people in different places do things. I use DuckDuckGo but it is not very good for things that are in Scandinavia.

[beable]

THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS

[beable]

Also if you mean by virulent rage
"MUST REMEMBER NOT TO THROW COMPUTER AT WALL WITH FULL FORCE BECAUSE EITHER IT BELONGS TO MY EMPLOYER AND THEY'LL BE MAD OR BECAUSE IT'S MINE AND I DONT WANT TO HAVE TO PAY TO REPLACE IT OMG"

then yes, virulent rage is a totally appropriate reaction

[azurelunatic]

Confirmed.

[filkferengi]

No answers, but here's a song about SQL, to cheer you up:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQJ51DNO33s

[ethelmay]

I did once locate special commands to make Google actually do exact-string searches. I will see if I can find them tomorrow.

[ethelmay]

https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/ has a complete list of advanced search terms. (I got there by searching the keywords [google search syntax] -- not actually in square brackets.)

Some of the more useful ones:

intext:

Find pages containing a certain word (or words) somewhere in the content. For this example, any results containing the word “apple” in the page content will be returned.

Example: intext:apple

allintext:

Similar to “intext,” but only results containing all of the specified words somewhere on the page will be returned.

Example: allintext:apple iphone

AROUND(X)

Proximity search. Find pages containing two words or phrases within X words of each other. For this example, the words “apple” and “iphone” must be present in the content and no further than four words apart.

Example: apple AROUND(4) iphone

[commodorified]

I don't know how this comment got past me when it dropped, but THANK YOU!!!!!!

[dewline]

1. A reasonable response to an irresponsible reaction to your reasonably set-up query.

2. No idea yet. Duck Duck Go tends to be useful to me, but I haven't had to test its abilities to that degree yet.

3. Understood. :-)