

 Ask HN: Is there a way to make Google web search work like it used to? - vaneck

Hi HN community.<p>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 <i>all</i> 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).<p>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.<p>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?<p>Thank you for your time.
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ColinWright
The first result I got was this:

[http://linuxonnotebooks.wordpress.com/2009/11/22/basketball-...](http://linuxonnotebooks.wordpress.com/2009/11/22/basketball-
notebook-pondexter-oliver-parted-on-bad-terms-seattle-post-intelligencer/)

That has all three words quite prominently placed.

You can always try DuckDuckGo: <http://duckduckgo.com/>

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vaneck
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'.

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mayoff
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

