Google Search URL Request Parameters (2016)

(stenevang.wordpress.com)

79 points | by layer8 551 days ago

5 comments

  • saagarjha 548 days ago
    It’s kind of sad to see all the crossed out items that no longer work. It’d be really nice if there was some sort of official interface to them besides trying to massage the natural language parser into what you want…
    • marginalia_nu 548 days ago
      I can totally see why. It's a lot of work maintaining these sorts of features, and sometimes they're made irrelevant in one way or another by some other feature.

      There's also a good reason not to document them too well, since documenting them is a weak promise that they'll stay around and keep working the same.

      • swyx 548 days ago
        i mean, is it that much work for a Google with its 100k developers? its not about upkeeping features, which are still there, its just about not breaking routing
        • hbn 548 days ago
          100k developers isn't near enough to simultaneously maintain these features while keeping up the rate of new messaging apps per year that need to be created.
  • getoffmyyawn 548 days ago
    These days, Google search makes me feel old and confused.

    The default now seems to be to ignore any search term it deems irrelevant. Whatever process is used to drop words from the query almost always drops the most important and significant words I have entered. Then it returns results that have nothing to do with my search.

    It's just baffling.

    • marginalia_nu 548 days ago
      The problem with almost any smart computer system is that the smarter it gets, the harder it becomes to understand why it behaves as it does.

      This in combination with the well-known design obstacle of having a text box as a the entire user interface making it so that you can't really communicate how to use it... well, it makes for a frustrating experience.

      It's a pretty deep-seated UX problem I'm not sure if there are any good answers to.

    • 0x_rs 548 days ago
      >The default now seems to be to ignore any search term it deems irrelevant.

      Could be worse, think of YouTube's search: ignores your query if it doesn't belong to the most popular videos on the platform, gives you irrelevant results from entirely unrelated videos with seldom any relation with what you were searching for, and goes as far as listing every few results 3-4 "you might also like" videos that have nothing to do with what you were looking for, at all, and are just whatever is trending (often actual scams usually related to crypto and unmoderated). I have no idea what twisted company culture fosters this sort of product development, but clearly search, what the company had become a synonymous for, has been tarnished beyond recognition.

    • thrashh 548 days ago
      Maybe you just notice the times where it doesn’t work well but it usually does work well but you don’t notice? Like bad CGI

      And if you do need to re-add it back, you can just “quote” the word

      • layer8 548 days ago
        That doesn’t always work, sometimes you need the verbatim option in addition.
        • thrashh 548 days ago
          I honestly haven’t ever had it not work for me

          If I quote enough words I get the Internet’s garbage

  • layer8 548 days ago
    The most useful one for me, that I use by default, is tbs=li:1 for verbatim search. (I suspect the "li" stands for "literal".)
    • thr717272 548 days ago
      Checking verbatim in the UI has done next to nothing for me for years.

      One of the main reasons I don't use Google anymore.

      Happened a couple of times on Kagi too (ok, they don't have verbatim I think but take doublequotes equally seriously), but when it happened, freediver personally showed up in the bug report and the name of the person who reported it got in the relevant release notes when it was fixed.

  • ronnier 548 days ago
    I wish google/YouTube would shut down all of their open redirects. The level abuse there is insane.
    • est 548 days ago
      Why is this comment downvoted? This is a legit concern. I don't want to Google/Youtube to track anything I clicked upon.
  • tandav 548 days ago
    I wrote a script to clean Google search url and keep only q param https://github.com/tandav/blog/blob/master/posts/clean_googl...