I’m sure this must just be a case of me not understanding how DA uses operators for searches, but hopefully someone here can point out where I’m going wrong.
I’m doing some research for a series of translations I’m doing. I wanted to find out more background on the concept of the “Sperrmarke-Konto” (a type of blocked account that Jews were forced to pay money into when trying to emigrate).
If I do a simple Google search (Sperrmarke Nazi Germany), the first hit that comes back has a rather detailed explanation of some points I wasn’t away of.
If I do a DA express web search with Sperrmarke AND Nazi AND Germany (or even just Sperrmarke AND “Nazi Germany”) I get different results the first couple of times (first time I got no hits whatsoever) and then they are consistent.
To finally get the hit I needed to appear at the top of my search list I had to enter Sperrmarke AND Nazi, which is fine, but why did it not return the right result with Sperrmarke AND “Nazi Germany”?
“Nazi Germany” is a phrase, so would filter out your ‘right result’ page if this exact text string didn’t appear in it.
Note: In evaluating the results of a search, it can be useful to examine the Log, which can report pages that were excluded, e.g., because the downloaded page’s size would have exceeded the maximum size set in DEVONagent Pro Preferences.
I am having a similar issue which has become frustrating to the point where I’m pretty much no longer using DA for anything.
First, if I go directly to duckduckgo.com (my preferred search engine) and enter ‘josephine “frito lay”’, the first entry is exactly what I was looking for. If I enter the same query into DA, the top link is about Eva Longoria Parker. What the… what? (The second is a patent for Frito Lay from 1987 which is fascinating but still not what I want).
I get similar non-results no matter what searches I use. If I go directly to DDG or Google, I get what I want in the top five results. If I go through DA or DAExpress, I get all manner of completely unrelated results. To make matters worse, both DA and DAExpress pull in tons of ‘aggregate forums’ (which scrape and repost forum discussions) so I see the same results over and over again only with different CSS applied. This happens when I do tech-related searches. For example, I was trying to find out if dragging a message out of Mail.app’s Junk folder would also mark it as ‘Not Spam’ in Gmail through IMAP. Eventually, I gave up and went directly to DDG instead (it does, by the way).
I imagine that I’m doing something wrong but these are simple searches. And it only gets worse if I use ‘Web (Deep)’ or beyond (which seems to return similar results, only fewer of them). I’m a huge DEVONtechnologies fan and pretty much live out of DEVONthink Pro Office but DA/DAExpress is a tool I really want to use all the time for every search I do and can’t.