My worst was trying to find information about COM (as in, Component Object Model, that ancient Microsoft technology). Most people use the acronym, not the expanded name, so I have to search for the acronym.
However, searching for COM gives me the most useless results: absolutely anything with a .com in it.
And also Comit Olmpico Mexicano (Mexican Olympic Committee)
I also HATE how Google tries to be smart and put Spanish results first because it notices Accept-Language: es, and probably that my IP is in Argentina. I want them ordered by RELEVANCE without caring about language. The most useful results for tech topics will be in English.
I wrote a note the other day to a vendor. An ingredient in their product was rapeseed. I had copied the ingredient list from their web site and pasted it into a text box. The web application kept failing because it automatically detected profanity. I removed the ingredient and it worked. Their application probably did a plain old dictionary search.
this reminds of a very nice quote on bash.org s top 100 listā¦
it was actually a friend of mine getting furious and frustrated since google didnt return any search result for his query on the bandā¦āthe whoā
So when will you be adding the or operator on the stack overflow tag search?
I have never used or in 10 years of using Google to search for things, quite successfully I might add. Why would I need it on SO? Is there some point in the far future where it becomes useful?
I do use not sometimes, and we support that on SO.
In general, band names are just the worst. But Google handles the well known ones pretty accurately; suprisingly, X and The Band both turned up the bands right away. Lesser known bands like Hey Hey My My (from France), though, not so much.
Not that Iāve read the replies, but itās a security issue how you configure the stop words, no? As theyāre released and thereās no standardization in databases, it is arduous at the least as a developer.
Re: Google, YouTube automatically wraps your input with now. Isnāt the new workaround to put a + before a stop word? No sense in that?
Actually, as a geek, the most frustrating thing is dealing with punctuation. How many times do I search for code or a specific error message that contains punctuation tha tis simply stripped out.
Or just search for C#, more likely than not, the hits you get back will be about C, not C#.
Which really makes you wonder, since itās us geeks that write search enginesā¦
Iād just be happy if I could search for .NET and not get results for every URL ending in .net, or C# and not get ones for C. They are quite unique terms, nowadays.
