Jimprall
Matt BlazeThis may be obvious, but I recently started routinely adding "-youtube" to google searches. This eliminates most pages with links to garbage YouTube-monetized videos that try to attract people looking for basic instructions on how to do simple things. Greatly improves the quality of search results.
White Gandalf@mattblaze @kentborg would that also work for pinterest? because annoying
Margie Coles@whytgndlf @mattblaze @kentborg yes! I routinely use it to eliminate Pinterest when I search household items.
Larena Woodmore
David Penfold 
@mattblaze I did a YouTube video on that ages ago
@davep Did you use a synthesized voice and show only screenshots? Because if not, you're wasting a lot if effort.
@mattblaze Seriously though, I use -site:sitename.tld when getting swamped. Didn't know you could leave out the site: bit.
@davep the advantage of “-youtube” over “-site:youtube.com” is the former excludes landing pages that link to YouTube clickbait. Obviously all this increasingly also risks excluding legit results, but what’s left tends to be better quality.
TheAnymouseProphet@mattblaze
Oh geez, that's something I've seen a lot when researching circuit design and quite frequently, they scraped content that doesn't belong to them to make the video, word for word.
@davep
Oh geez, that's something I've seen a lot when researching circuit design and quite frequently, they scraped content that doesn't belong to them to make the video, word for word.
@davep
Matt Zagaja@mattblaze use Kagi and you can just keep YouTube down ranked 😃 https://www.Kagi.com
Juri@mattblaze doing this with Pinterest also works wonders
Johnnt@mattblaze tbh I am finding google results pretty poor in general recently with the majority of the first page mainly just sponsored ads and click bait. I end up using DDG when I don’t want anything regional.
Morgan ⚧️@johnnt @mattblaze same. Even Google results that aren't ads are primarily YouTube, Twitter, Quora questions that make you scroll through 5 million other questions before reading the answer, broken reddit links and ai generated FAQs. On DuckDuckGo I can at least find some blog posts
But without the double quotes, right?
ex: keyword1 keyword2 -youtube
not keyword1 keyword2 "-youtube"
People that are not familiar with the search options may not realize that by double quoting, it escapes the meaning of minus sign which is to exclude.
@SpaceLifeForm They are welcome to experiment.
Ken Butler has moved@SpaceLifeForm @mattblaze putting the minus *outside* the quotes seems to work.
Yep. The purpose of the quotes is to create a phrase. Once a minus sign (dash) is inside, it becomes part of the phrase, and the dash is no longer a meta character that means to exclude from the search results.
@SpaceLifeForm @mattblaze that's a nice clear explanation of why it works that way.
I have found these to be useful on google
define:
site:
inurl:
map:
weather:
There are more
hXXps://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/
Virginia S. O'Possum@mattblaze do other Boolean search things work?
@VirginiaSOpossum There's a bunch of useful stuff you can do to restrict searches. See the "operators" section of this for a starting point: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en
@mattblaze Thank you!
mathew@mattblaze Just checked and "-amazon -youtube" helps a ton when searching for product reviews.
@mathew Yes, the nice thing about that (rather that using "-site:amazon.com") is that it excludes not just amazon reviews, but reviews with affiliate links to amazon.
AlexanderMars@mattblaze check out a #SearxNG instance when you get a chance. If you like it you can even host your own private instance.
greenboxcode@mattblaze #PeerTube might also be a good place to search for those that are trying to de-google their lives.
Scissors Cut Paper...Legit. When i want a video, I'll start at YouTube, not a general search.
@mattblaze It feels like I'm seeing these videos pop up more and more as time goes on. I wonder if a tool/solution could be made to filter them out on request.
stiffelman@mattblaze great tip
@mattblaze @weirdwriter Wow, what a great tip and it definitely wasn’t obvious to me although it probably should have been since I use that technique with other terms, never thought of applying it to YouTube though, that’s fantastic.
LittleScrapsoftheNorth@mattblaze wait … what? So like if I wanted to not see Pinterest I would type orange plaid sheets-Pinterest ? Is this the right syntax? Oh my god this would solve one of my biggest annoyance of searching .
Air Adam@littlescraps @mattblaze yep, just need an extra space in there so it'd be;
Orange plaid sheets -pinterest
Anders Puck Nielsen@mattblaze I recently switched to Kagi from Google for search, and it’s fantastic. It’s like returning to the time when Google just gave you the best results.
Saustrup@anderspuck @mattblaze I recently switched to Duck Duck Go, but it feels like it's a whole different result set than Google would present. Giving Kagi a go now - looking forward to see how that works out.
@saustrup @mattblaze I used Duck Duck Go for several years but definitely think Kagi is better.
Lou Katz@mattblaze Thanks for the EXTREMELY useful search hint. I almost never want a video. I could read when I was 4.
Leona@mattblaze oooh, useful, thank you.
gunstick@mattblaze ah, that's why google whats to change the - into a suggestion and not a pure filter.
Keith Bradnam 📈@mattblaze Brilliant suggestion, thank you.
Ian Kluft 🖥️📡@mattblaze And similarly you can block YouTube results from DuckDuckGo searches by using -site:youtube
Burn This Dyspho Out 🏳️⚧️@mattblaze Thanks a lot for the tips, I had no idea!
Michael Knudsen@mattblaze you should teach people this by uploading a video to YouTube, getting rich in the process:
"GREAT GOOGLE SEARCH #LIFEHACK (THAT WORKS)"
Canadian Curmudgeon@mattblaze
As a Canadian, I don't use the anti-Canadian Google since it's attack on our soveraignty, but I use similar operators on Bing.
As a Canadian, I don't use the anti-Canadian Google since it's attack on our soveraignty, but I use similar operators on Bing.
Mark Hughes@mattblaze I've long stopped using #Google because it is no longer a #SearchEngine but an ad serving privacy hazard.
I still use keyword filters (eg with #Startpage), always have, but long to be able to have a standard set that always apply and to be able to add domains and keywords to this with a right click on the results.
Yet nobody has made this #BrowserPlugIn AFAIK 🤔
Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏@mattblaze These days that only eliminates part of the problem. I still get long for sites with titles like "How to do X" but then there's 10K words on the history of X the reasons why you might want to do X, blah blah blah and eventually a non-answer like "it's really your choice". Insanely, sometimes the YT videos have the most direct answer.
I started using different search engines and am seriously considering paying for something like kagi.com so I can actually get relevant results again.
your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦@mattblaze @lisamelton i don’t use google any more and still had to come up with some long ass filters to find anything
@mattblaze using duckduckgo solves the problem too
Christopher Masto@mattblaze Sorry, I can't follow your instructions unless they come in the form of a video with a garish thumbnail of you looking astonished by a question.
@mattblaze
Since Google is YouTube, I use Duck, Duck Go while not allowing google cookies. I too get fewer YouTube results.
*nods*
Since Google is YouTube, I use Duck, Duck Go while not allowing google cookies. I too get fewer YouTube results.
*nods*
Choobs@mattblaze I long wistfully for the days when looking for a tutorial turned up a bunch of links to actual written pages rather than some gurning “YouTube personality” who only knows what he’s watched in other, equally grim, videos.
Marcos Dione@mattblaze I think DDG has a search API (but I can't find it). maybe we could do a frontend that lets you build a no-list of crappy SEO/AI sites, so you get only the good results?
Sheila the Wonderbink@mattblaze Oh, yeah, I’m definitely putting that one in my pocket. It’s not even about the quality of the information, it’s just that I strongly prefer instructions that I can print out and carry with me.
Aaron W | ☕️@mattblaze this is brilliant!
k cavaliere
peacememories@mattblaze when I was hoping for DuckDuckGo to catch up to Google in niche search result quality I didn’t expect it would happen because Googles results became unusable 🤦
Pait@mattblaze Good suggestion, I’ll try for Duck searches - rarely use G anymore.