15 Responses:

1. ivorjawa says:

   15 years ago at 7:03 am

   http://www.givemebackmygoogle.com/

   • fgmr says:

     15 years ago at 11:43 am

     A couple years ago Google had an experiment where you could nuke either specific results or all results from a domain. Unfortunately, for whatever reason that experiment never took off. There's now the ability to nuke specific results, but that doesn't scale.

2. krick says:

   15 years ago at 10:17 am

   The problem is that every site on the internet trying to sell something either has a "review" section for each item page that lets random buyers comment on the item, or they are one of those retailers that tries to sell things by cloaking them in one-page fake reviews. Either way, there's so much noise now, that it's impossible to find actual honest-to-goodness product reviews anymore.

   The only way to combat it is try different or additional words in your search in hopes of filtering out the noise.

   Try searches like this:

   product -shipping
   product shootout
   product benchmarks
   product review conclusion

3. httf says:

   15 years ago at 11:07 am

   Indeed. I had an endearing conversation with a friend recently who was frustrated that all of her searches for "free porn" had never unearthed youporn.

   But some things have improved! I discovered a new google-gives-you-exactly-what-you-want feature last night: Apparently knowing celebrity heights is essential as metric conversion.

   • xaosenkosmos says:

     15 years ago at 12:10 pm

     Damn, "Convert 1 mile into Johnny Depp heights" doesn't work.

     • gytterberg says:

       15 years ago at 5:09 pm

       It knows Smoots, however. Johnny Depp and Oliver Smoot must be categorized differently.

   • gytterberg says:

     15 years ago at 5:04 pm

     I've always wondered how that feature works. Or at least, smart it is. Is it really clever enough to distill facts from the internet with enough certainty to just tell you like that? When it comes to actual conversion units I'm sure it's programmed in, but for stuff like that... it opens up a whole new application for google-bombing. (ie have enough people put "Johnny Depp is 3'7"" in enough places and see what happens... what would be most hilarious is if it took an average, and Johnny Depp got increasingly shorter)

4. mcity says:

   15 years ago at 7:20 pm

   Rememeber when you could search for "showname + episodes" and you'd find more than just torrents?

5. 7leaguebootdisk says:

   15 years ago at 9:12 pm

   product name + sucks

   Works fairly well. Still have to sort the normal people from the loons.

   Not sure you need the review, might hurt more than it helps.

6. strspn says:

   15 years ago at 11:49 pm

   Try taking the space out after the plus sign; you want [productname +review] works for me.

   • jwz says:

     15 years ago at 1:40 am

     Way to completely miss the point, dude.

7. violentbloom says:

   15 years ago at 12:40 am

   yeah and tagging really fucking helps with searches too doesn't it? especially because idiots put all kinds of crap in there.

   • mhoye says:

     15 years ago at 10:25 am

     Don't hate, there's some good stuff to be found in some tags.

8. lroberson says:

   15 years ago at 9:08 am

   Google SearchWiki can do this and more.

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8Pl1H0dIXE

   • lroberson says:

     15 years ago at 9:10 am

     Okay, let me clarify my absurdly broad and undetailed message before I get a typical jwz response:

     Google SearchWiki can let you remove domains (as someone else mentioned above). I find it useful for blocking out the usual suspects.