Is anyone annoyed by google results as regularly as I am? We are approaching a sum "0" when it comes to search engines, I'd hate to see google fall by the way of Wal-mart in that it's the only choice and it sucks. With that premiss, shouldn't we have ways to filter our searches? For example; if you're searching for hints on php programming, you will undoubtedly get some good results from stackoverflow, but in this case the information is too technical for your inquiry, it would be nice if you could do a search with omissions. Furthermore, it goes without saying that we are not always looking to buy something and search results do not discriminate and invariably try to sell you something while it is the furthest thing from your mind, another case for an omission. If you are listening, tell me somebody's working on this so I can stop pulling out my hair

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What has your rant have to do with DaniWeb? No one at DaniWeb can do anything about bad google results. Maybe you are just entering the wrong keywords in google??

There are alternatives to google if you want more unbiased results, in particular, you can use DuckDuckGo. Here is a comparison of results for "php programming", DDG vs Google. As you can see, you far less ads or general "preferred" websites, and instead, more diverse and relevant results.

Google is largely turning into a man-in-the-middle for the internet as a whole, and that's a huge problem. On the one side, you have all the people depending on google to allow them to find stuff on the internet, and on the other side, you have tons of businesses that rely almost exclusively on being easy to find from google in order to be able to get customers. That is a huge position of strength for google, meaning that they can make or break any business, and thus, they can extort everyone. They used to just sell ads on their sites. Now, they can extort businesses for their right to be visible on the internet. And that's why their search results are so biased now.

As far as filtering is concerned, I don't of any good tool that exists for that. It is quite difficult to "filter" searches without actually creating your own search engine, because it's really not that easy to discriminate between different categories of content (ads, commercial, educational, etc.) without doing a lot of indexing of your own. I would suggest you look into the alternatives to google, many of which actually index websites in a very different way, leading to more "relevant" results as opposed to google which is geared towards providing "popular" and "lucrative" (for them) results. Here are a few interesting alternatives.

I especially like the simplicity of the bangs at DDG's. Just prepend !daniweb to your query, and you are searching here.

Try turning personal results on or off, or even try logging out of Google+ entirely when you conduct your google searches. You'll find that results tend to be customized to your own browsing behavior, so logging out and clearing cookies throws a few settings back to default

all good information especially knowing there are alternatives, thanks

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