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Comments 18

bateleur January 29 2013, 12:05:26 UTC
Whilst I endorse your rant completely, a workaround for this specific search is: doxygen "don't link"

This works because the engine doesn't seem to carry out substitutions within exact match strings.

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venta January 29 2013, 12:08:59 UTC
Yes, and is in fact what I did - in fact, doxygen don't "link" was sufficient for me to establish that it wasn't going to find what I wanted. (Although I don't blame that on Google - looks like there is no way to persuade doxygen not to do the auto-linking.)

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ar_gemlad January 29 2013, 12:31:27 UTC
It's really annoying that Google removed the + syntax.

I'm afraid I'm about 6 years out of date when it comes to search engines; I did cover quite a few of them in my library degree, but the field has changed so much! I can't even remember which ones are powered by Google any more!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines
I recognise only 5 of the general and metasearch engines listed there, and I'm sure I wrote about ones that don't exist any more.

I'm sure I had a point when I started this comment, but I seem to have misplaced it.

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ext_1280751 January 29 2013, 14:38:54 UTC
I assume putting a '%' before the link doesn't work? I'm not really up on doxygen, though maybe I should start writing documentation :)

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venta January 29 2013, 14:42:22 UTC
Someone give that man a coconut - that does indeed work. Thank you very much! (On what basis did you guess that? I couldn't find any vestige of hint in the doxygen docs.)

maybe I should start writing documentation

Speaking as a technical author, I encourage you not to bother - virtually no one reads the damn stuff, anyway!

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lnr January 29 2013, 15:56:53 UTC
Speaking as a technical author, I encourage you not to bother - virtually no one reads the damn stuff, anyway!

*snort*

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venta January 29 2013, 15:57:47 UTC
Contrariwise, when I've got my programmer hat on, I quite appreciate the stuff. I read it, dammit!

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nalsa January 29 2013, 16:28:27 UTC
Imagine my astonishment when I discovered "Ask Jeeves" still exists. Sad! that! altavista! is! now! Yahoo!, though!

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damerell January 29 2013, 16:37:40 UTC
venta January 29 2013, 16:46:37 UTC
Last time I looked, Bing seemed to do a fairly poor job of finding stuff. I'll give it another whirl.

Inspired by nalsa's Ask-related comments above, I've just discovered that Lycos still exists. Who knew? For my current favourite test string (franz harary tackey) it produces results considerably more shite than Google's. Oh, many of which are also produced by Bing (eg http://top-products-services.com/articles/babies.html, which seems to have a text box full of random words at the bottom, ensuring hits for almost anything).

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undyingking January 29 2013, 16:59:27 UTC
Knowing Google, there's likely a backdoor undocumented syntax option to 'turn off all the clever stuff'.

Although a GreaseMonkey script that automatically wrapped your search terms in double quotes would be a good start. And might exist already?

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venta January 29 2013, 17:01:45 UTC
Hmm, yes, the GreaseMonkey idea would be a step forward - but still wouldn't, I don't think, be as good as Google used to be (see comments about searching for 'franz harary "tackey"' above).

One of my colleagues did think there was a "just bloody look for it" button, but then couldn't find it. "I feel retro", perhaps :)

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