allintext:

I know that the small net isn't really 
a place that's friendly to big tech, 
but this is a post about Google. We 
all have to use it sometimes.

It seems that search efficacy has 
degraded dramatically over the past 20 
years. I find it more and more 
difficult to locate sites on the 
internet. Google seems to ignore the 
focus of my searches in order to 
provide me with advertising. I 
frequently try several search 
engines[1], often just to avoid 
Google, and still don't find the 
material for which I've been 
searching. Personal, non-commercial 
sites are especially difficult to 
find.

Then, this morning, as a result of a 
post on the Hacker News[2], I went 
looking for search operators that 
still work. I found this page: 

https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/

Buried well down the page is the 
operator "allintext:" (without the 
quotation marks). It's a piece of 
search magic that forces Google to 
comb the body text of a page (and 
nothing else, apparently) for all of 
your terms, as if you put AND between 
each term and added, "and I mean it 
this time!"

Preface your searches with it and 
you'll suddenly find that Google works 
again, returning results that come a 
lot closer to what you hoped to find.


[1] duckduckstart.com provides 
duckduckgo and startpage 
functionality. It's worth a look.

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30083783