It's mind boggling that the 'world's greatest search engine' does not have a series of advanced features that let's us really alter our searches in a consistently customized way.
The 'advanced search' section does allow for some things, but it's a little awkward, moreover, 'the things we want' are not on there!
The ability to drop sites - or at least discount them (i.e. quora, pointerest)
The ability to turn off Google's extrapolated information, such as the definitions that appear.
The ability to tag/highlight result from some sites (i.e. put a pin on some sites, say Wikipedia)
The ability to prefer some words over others in the weighting
The ability to actually require some words (I find it amazing that top results often don't have a key search term - I understand why that makes sense in some scenarios, but for most others I typed the term because I want it)
Etc. etc..
There are a ton of other features that would be useful, I'm surprised they haven't moved into this niche.
I feel that Google is no longer 'search' it's just 'find'. We type it as a means to 'get to that thing' and we just click on one of the first results.
The 'advanced search' section does allow for some things, but it's a little awkward, moreover, 'the things we want' are not on there!
The ability to drop sites - or at least discount them (i.e. quora, pointerest)
The ability to turn off Google's extrapolated information, such as the definitions that appear.
The ability to tag/highlight result from some sites (i.e. put a pin on some sites, say Wikipedia)
The ability to prefer some words over others in the weighting
The ability to actually require some words (I find it amazing that top results often don't have a key search term - I understand why that makes sense in some scenarios, but for most others I typed the term because I want it)
Etc. etc..
There are a ton of other features that would be useful, I'm surprised they haven't moved into this niche.
I feel that Google is no longer 'search' it's just 'find'. We type it as a means to 'get to that thing' and we just click on one of the first results.