Google tools for customizing searches (opens in new tab)

That verbatim option looks like it might be a way to largely bring back the old Google which tended to work quite well for me (except that modern SEO spam means we can probably never have the old Google again).

I’ve been pissed off with Google for (10+?) years now, ever since it became apparent to me that they changed their search from returning what you queried to some kind of fuzzy guess at what they think you’re looking for (probably based on what average, ie, non technical, people look for).

Possibly that verbatim option puts it back to what used to work pretty well for me, but because they changed it without really saying and then made the option for the old behaviour hidden away with an obtuse name, I had no idea about it until reading this article and had largely written them off as being more interested in showing adverts than what I was actually looking for.

Once I discovered that ChatGPT and similar are almost always way better at finding what I was actually looking for than Google ever was, Google is now very far from my first choice of search service.

It also helps that LLMs tend to be very good at helping you find the correct term, project, technology name, etc, for something when you’re not sure up front of what term to search for exactly.

This is a fantastic resource. The author only briefly covers library databases, but there's so much more in structured querying that could be worth covering.

For example, you can use Sparql to perform structured queries on Wikidata (a structured database version of Wikipedia) to get well beyond unstructured documents.

Here's every person in Wikibase that was born in NYC: https://query.wikidata.org/#%23Humans%20born%20in%20New%20Yo...

> Wrapping a phrase in quotation marks forces Google to find pages where those exact words appear in that exact order.

This hasn't been the case for at least five years surely?

Guess how that library from the photo looks from outside...

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadtbibliothek_am_Mail%C3%A4n...

lots of useful Google search tricks and syntax all in one place. I already knew many of these. But verbatim mode is new to me and addresses a major complaint I’ve had about increasingly fuzzy semantic search.

FWIW, this article isn't your usual substack slop. There are some Googling tricks and techniques here that I've never seen documented elsewhere, such as AROUND(n).

> A 2024 study by SparkToro found that nearly 60% of Google searches end without anyone clicking through to a website, and the trend has accelerated since. By February 2026, Ahrefs found that queries triggering AI Overviews now see a 58% reduction in clicks.

I disable the AI spam by Google, but even doing so still does not help uncripple what Google ruined here. Google search is next to useless now - and that was a deliberate change by Google. Oddly enough, the alternative search engines also suck, so I don't blame Google for everything - just the majority part of suckage here.

We need a new search engine. Google failed us here. AdCompanies always fail. Google committed to an ads only company.

> There used to be a professional layer between most people and raw information. Librarians, researchers, editors, fact-checkers: people whose entire job was to understand how information was organized, who produced it, what motivated them, and where the gaps were in any given source. You didn’t need to think much about any of that, because someone else already had.

> That layer has largely dissolved. Search engines replaced the card catalog, algorithms replaced the reference interview, and AI summaries are now stepping in where a librarian’s judgment about source quality used to sit. What’s been left in place of all that professional mediation is a search bar and the assumption that you’ll figure it out. - https://cardcatalogforlife.substack.com/i/188856309/the-skil...

An unfortunate conclusion that smuggles in unwarranted good-old-days nostalgia to an otherwise excellent overview. The previous system that they're describing had serious problems, limited access to raw data compared to now, and could not have scaled up to the level of access to information that the internet provides.

The information environment prior to the early 2000s was quite terrible. We shouldn't pretend this was a golden age of truth-oriented gatekeeping, although there were certainly gatekeepers. There were a lot of misconceptions, errors, and unchecked biases on dead trees and in late 90s databases. The idea that those librarians, researchers, editors, fact-checkers were aligned with anything you might care about is also unsupported and dubious.