Google is an incredibly useful database of indexed websites, but querying Google doesn't search for what you type literally. The algorithms behind Google's searches can lead to a lot of irrelevant results. Still, with the right operators, we can be more exact while searching for information that's time-sensitive or difficult to find.
If you've ever searched for the answer to a programming question and found yourself buried in results that don't work, or tried to look up someone with the same name as someone famous, you may have experienced some of the shortcomings of Google. Because Google by default doesn't search for the literal words you type, it's common to end up with a ton of unrelated results
Types of Searches Google Isn't Good At
There are a lot of things Google does well, but looking for certain types of answers expose these flaws pretty clearly. If we're trying to figure out why we're getting a Python error, you can see immediately why these search results might not be useful.
Yikes! For a search about a library that is actively updated, an article from 2014 has a meager chance of still working as described in 2019.
Another problem comes up when we start trying to search for programming and technical terms that may have other, more universal meanings. If what we're looking for is the standard list feature of C++, the query would be "std :: list". Searching for this produces many unpleasant and unrelated results as Google ignores the "::" and returns a list of sexually transmitted diseases.
Staring at a screen full of confusing results can be daunting. Still, we can clean up these searches by understanding the way Google finds information and using operators to zero ..
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