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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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Although I cannot find the link (@2rafa's Google fu is apparently better than mine), this certainly looks like something copypasted from Kevin MacDonald, complete with citations of his own works.

I'll give you an opportunity to convince me otherwise or explain yourself, otherwise you are looking at a ban for bad-faith engagement. (You are allowed to link and quote people, you are not allowed to copy an entire essay from elsewhere and pretend it's yours, just to test for reactions.)

link: https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2018/10/01/the-war-on-white-australia-a-case-study-in-the-culture-of-critique-part-1-of-5/

quotes around the entire thing for exact matches are good for trying to find a source for a verbatim sentence

Thanks. I tried the quotes thing but for some reason didn't get that hit.

From my experience working in a job where the use of the quotes feature was vital: Google will randomly and without warning place users into experimental variations of their features as a form of A/B testing. If you get placed in the "Google prioritizes words in quotes" user bucket and not the "Google demands exact string match of words in quote" bucket, your search won't turn up the exact results and you're just out of luck.

I managed to escalate this issue quite high into Google support at one point, and the above was more or less everything they told me. Was quite stressful when I needed the exact match for my job.

Do you not get the option for verbatim mode, or does it not work for you? It's buried in there for me, but if I do a search, I get a little "Tools" button below and to the right of the search bar, and then from there I can switch from "All Results" to "Verbatim", where "Verbatim" actually respects quotes still.

If they're removing even that escape hatch I think it's time for me to find a new search engine.

Admittedly it's been years since my experience with it, but I don't recall that being an option at the time. Could've just missed it though. Thank you for mentioning it, it'll likely help me out in the future.