I think you need to toggle "Verbatim" in the search tools option for it to work, otherwise it just kinda tries to guess what you are looking for, search terms be damned.
this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2025
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Stop using Google?
Any (free) alternatives that don't exhibit this behavior?
DuckDuckGo follows instructions
This is the one that I use.
Wth I've been using this one for years and it never used to listen when I told it to do this, and now you're telling me it does? Since when?
I have never had a wrong response, so I can’t tell since when.
Give the browser extension uBlacklist a try if you want to always filter out specific sites. I did that to block some AI slop and content mill sites that are good at gaming search engines.
On Kagi you can block domains from the results, if that's what you're looking for.
Maybe because of inconvenience. Who's gonna type it in front of every search they do? Maybe some more knowledgeable people will do.
Well, they supported this syntax in the past. At some point they broke it.
For sure, they didn't bother fixing it, because only more knowledgable people used this. But yeah, still valid to complain about it then...
@Ephera@lemmy.ml @dating1999@lemmy.ca
site:domain.tld does work, as an and x constraint. I often use it.
It seems to me like the OP's specific and (not x) usage of site:domain.tld is the reason why it isn't working. While the negation prefix (-) does work for tokens/words (e.g. mercury -freddie), it's probably transforming site into a token not to be included in the results (i.e. "any results that don't contain the word "site") which, disconnected from the rest of the sentence (:quora.com), turns the latter into part of what the results should include, so the query ends up being something like:
Filter all the indexed Web results where its contents don't include the word "site", possibly do include "quora.com", possibly do include "Molten", possibly do include "boron", possibly do include "oxide", possibly do include "attacks", possibly do include "silicates"
The negation prefix has a similar effect to that of positive (+) prefix (e.g. "mercury +periodic +table") as it turns the word into a required condition (must be present for "+", must be absent for "-") rather than an optional condition (i.e a search for "mercury periodic table", without quotes, will contain pages with all three words in any order, pages with just two of the three words (such as "mercury periodic" in any order) and pages with only one of the three words (such as "mercury" which would include pages talking about the singer, and pages talking about the planet and pages talking about the Roman deity), ranked by "relevance").
As Quora pages do include "quora.com" somewhere within the page body, the first results will be from Quora because it's part of the parsed condition (which is to optionally include "quora.com" as part of the result while discarding results containing the verbatim word "site").
Try tapping the "search instead for" link.
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