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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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The biggest problem with Google search - and indeed almost all search engines, even intrasite searches - relative to how little it's complained about is by far the insistence on showing results even when very little actually matched the query. If my query gives me little to no results, then please just fucking tell me that and I'll adjust my query. Stop wasting my time showing me something that matched only 2 out of my 3 keywords. I put that third term there for a reason. It's as if the search engine assumes I'm in the habit of searching things like 2022 senate election results parfait, where it can safely disregard one of my terms because I'm just stupid or something. My query was written how it was written for a reason, damnit.

Google is actually vastly ahead of most other search engines in this regard, since it actually lets you enclose a term in quotation marks* to ensure it shows up in the results. This is still annoying, however, because sometimes I want the search engine to permit some amount of fuzziness in a term (e.g., include synonyms).

* And yes, before the naysayers appear, this does work - the only reason you think it doesn't is because your quoted term appears somewhere not visible on the page, like a dropdown menu, or has been removed from the page since it was cached.