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  • Re: More effective searching

    From Loris Bennett@21:1/5 to Jan Claeys on Mon Jun 30 14:10:01 2025
    Jan Claeys <lists@janc.be> writes:

    On Tue, 2025-06-24 at 07:27 -0500, Richard Owlett wrote:
    Side Issue -- Google and DuckDuckGo seem more interested in quantity
    rather than quality. Any pointers to search engine with friendly
    Boolean search? TIA

    "You" "can" "try" "putting" "double" "quotes" "around" "every" "word"
    AND "word group" OR -use -dashes -to -exclude

    https://www.lifehack.org/articles/technology/20-tips-use-google-search-efficiently.html
    https://www.lifewire.com/bing-advanced-search-3482817

    ... might also be useful (DDG is based on Bing)

    In the past with DDG '-' excluded and '+' included, but now that is no
    the case. Rather, to quote from

    https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/syntax

    the meaning is the following:

    cats -dogs Fewer dogs in results
    cats +dogs More dogs in results

    Just after this change was made several years ago, I found that in some
    cases, adding

    '-foo'

    actually lead to more results containing 'foo' than when 'foo' was
    omitted completely, presumably because less 'foo' is potentially still
    more than no 'foo'. I did complain to DDG at the time and I have the impression that the issues has now been fixed.

    Cheers,

    Loris

    --
    This signature is currently under constuction.

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  • From Richard Owlett@21:1/5 to Loris Bennett on Mon Jun 30 16:10:01 2025
    On 6/30/25 6:42 AM, Loris Bennett wrote:
    Jan Claeys <lists@janc.be> writes:

    On Tue, 2025-06-24 at 07:27 -0500, Richard Owlett wrote:
    Side Issue -- Google and DuckDuckGo seem more interested in quantity
    rather than quality. Any pointers to search engine with friendly
    Boolean search? TIA

    "You" "can" "try" "putting" "double" "quotes" "around" "every" "word"
    AND "word group" OR -use -dashes -to -exclude

    https://www.lifehack.org/articles/technology/20-tips-use-google-search-efficiently.html
    https://www.lifewire.com/bing-advanced-search-3482817

    ... might also be useful (DDG is based on Bing)

    In the past with DDG '-' excluded and '+' included, but now that is no
    the case. Rather, to quote from

    https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/syntax


    Thanks for the link. I'll be exploring it.
    Also, the headings at https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/ are intriguing. Will also explore them.


    the meaning is the following:

    cats -dogs Fewer dogs in results
    cats +dogs More dogs in results

    Just after this change was made several years ago, I found that in some cases, adding

    '-foo'

    actually lead to more results containing 'foo' than when 'foo' was
    omitted completely, presumably because less 'foo' is potentially still
    more than no 'foo'. I did complain to DDG at the time and I have the impression that the issues has now been fixed.

    Cheers,

    Loris


    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Richard Owlett@21:1/5 to Jan Claeys on Mon Jun 30 16:00:02 2025
    On 6/30/25 5:59 AM, Jan Claeys wrote:
    On Tue, 2025-06-24 at 07:27 -0500, Richard Owlett wrote:
    Side Issue -- Google and DuckDuckGo seem more interested in quantity
    rather than quality. Any pointers to search engine with friendly
    Boolean search? TIA

    "You" "can" "try" "putting" "double" "quotes" "around" "every" "word"
    AND "word group"

    I had discovered that some time ago finding it more predictable than attempting to use capitalized AND in it's Boolean sense.

    OR -use -dashes -to -exclude

    Didn't know that. Thanks.


    https://www.lifehack.org/articles/technology/20-tips-use-google-search-efficiently.html
    https://www.lifewire.com/bing-advanced-search-3482817


    Interesting links. Will experiment to see how well they match with how
    well they match with my goals for using DuckDuckGo.
    I rigorously avoid *ANYTHING* Google related whenever physically possible.

    ... might also be useful (DDG is based on Bing)



    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)