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I have an example from just yesterday. I am new(ish) to the rails ecosystem and spotted a `.ruby-version` file in the root of the repository. I didn't know what it was so I googled `.ruby-version`. The results were less than helpful because Google interpreted that as a search for the term `ruby version`. Fine, whatever, I will just fall back on double-quoting the whole thing, like `".ruby-version"`. A couple of years ago this would have worked perfectly - I know, because I've been doing it for years. But Google no longer respects this kind of search query, instead it tries to be too clever by half and end up being worse than useless.


I miss the days when punctuation marks were significant to google searches. And the days when you could use logic operands in searches like +&!

I’m glad I learned POSIX and especially Linux when searches were evaluated more literally. It was simple to locate relevant technical pages.

It’s a shame google doesn’t offer legacy search.




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