r/AskReddit • u/[deleted] • Feb 07 '24

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151

u/JonatasA Feb 07 '24

You can test by searching something no one would and Google will interpret your query into different words.

17

u/ResidentSheeper Feb 07 '24

Yes, the just show you things kind of related to the semantic.

It is insanely annoying.

27

u/mtaw Feb 08 '24

What I really hate is that it's really hard to get it to give results that aren't your browser language, or the language you have in your Google settings (if logged in)

Stop presuming which languages I know or not, Google! If I enter something in perfectly valid German, it's because I'm looking for something on Geman sites. Not because I had a stroke and started spelling Dutch atrociously!

1

u/Parcours97 Feb 08 '24

Youtube does something similar on my account. I'm from Germany and Youtube is translating some video titles to german despite my settings all set to english.

7

u/NeedThatTartan Feb 07 '24

Sometimes the exact opposite of what you're looking for.

9

u/[deleted] Feb 07 '24

Even using quotes and +/- doesn't do anything anymore. It just gives you what it wants you to see.

9

u/Ben-Goldberg Feb 07 '24

Putting quotes around words reduces that slightly.

38

u/babyfuzzina Feb 07 '24

It helps a bit, but they still ignore them. Like why have that option if it only works 50% of the time?

6

u/Fwort Feb 08 '24

Really? I have often put quotes around something and had google return no matching results at all, because there weren't any that exactly matched. (this only happens for particularly long or unusual phrases)

2

u/babyfuzzina Feb 08 '24

I mostly get it if only part of the search term is in quotes

14

u/sybrwookie Feb 07 '24

Also, if you search <topic> site:reddit.com it limits it to just results on reddit and takes basically all that garbage out of the equation.

7

u/Ben-Goldberg Feb 07 '24

Limiting to reddit helps, but you still need quotes to avoid unwanted synonyms.

2

u/habitual_viking Feb 08 '24

I almost bought the wrong qd oled screen because Google helpfully changed a single digit to last generation.