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Tell HN: Use “Verbatim mode” to fix Google search

37 points by eof ↗ HN
I, and it seems many others, have noticed a massive decline in quality of google search results. Really frustrating behavior like ignoring quoted strings, giving me results that omit the most important token for my search, etc.

I see tons of discussion on this and very few people mentioning the verbatim mode which completely fixes all of this toxic search behavior.

Among a tiny, informal survey of my nerdy/developer/tech friends literally none of them knew about this feature.

So based on the discussion happening now, and extrapolation, I am assuming most of HN also doesn't know.

After you do a search, choose `Tools -> All Results -> Verbatim`. This will give you the behavior that you used to get from google search.

9 comments

[ 8.4 ms ] story [ 309 ms ] thread
asimjalis
What is the difference. What exactly does this do?
thatcat
"With the Verbatim tool, you can search using the exact keywords you typed," explains Google.Verbatim disables Google's spelling corrections and Google no longer replaces some of your keywords with synonyms (e.g.: television / TV), similar terms (e.g: buy flowers / send flowers), words with the same stem (e.g.: fixing / fix).
peakaboo
This reads like encouraging people to stay with an abusive partner. He will change anytime now...
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johnny22
I've used verbatim mode for awhile, but I don't know why the time/date filter work with it though :(
alok-g
I have been using Verbatim mode for years. The quality of results for this mode has declined too drastically. Verbatim mode is not true to its name anymore. For the last several months, verbatim mode has been performing even more poorly for me than the default mode.

Various prior HN discussions on degradation in Google search quality have talked about Verbatim mode too.

chris37879
Yeah, especially in the last month. Searching for anything about Flutter Web basically only returns results about pure web, now. I love that they don't even consider their own framework to be an important keyword...