Ask HN: Is there a way to make Google web search work like it used to?
Hi HN community.
I, the same, as pretty much everyone, used to very much enjoy Google's way of doing web search. With that I mean the old way of only listing results that contained all the words one had searched for. This started changing a couple of years ago, and has made my work as a Sysadmin harder when searching for error messages (you can sometimes get around this by using quotes or adding plus signs before each word, but not always).
For an example of this sad, sad behaviour I challenge you to do a web search for "linux notebook basketball", visit the first result and find the word 'notebook' anywhere in the page.
So: do you know of a way to make Google default to the older and in my opinion saner behaviour? Alternatively: is there a better option available for the times when you really do know what you want to search for?
Thank you for your time. The first result I got was this: http://linuxonnotebooks.wordpress.com/2009/11/22/basketball-... That has all three words quite prominently placed. You can always try DuckDuckGo: http://duckduckgo.com/ Bad example then, Google shows me this as the first result: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=933508 DuckDuckGo is nice but not for this. The same keywords yield a first result which includes 'notebook' and 'linux' but not 'basketball'. I don't think you can change the default, but you can use + to force the word to be present in the result pages: +linux +notebook +basketball