With too many companies gaming google, it's getting to be near useless, particularly if you're looking for anything software-related. Try searching for a type of software, as opposed to a specific title, and you're inundated with useless sites touting "best X" or "top 5 X".

One solution is the approach we've taken in our Library (http://www.retouchpro.com/library) (thanks to Craig). But as handy as that is for retouching resources, it's limited to what users submit (have you submitted anything recently?).

So, I guess my question is: have you found a better solution than google for your general technique/software searches? I'm not limiting this to retouching, so I'm posting this in Salon.

Technique is pretty easy to find for me. photoshop dodge burn brush layer lighten darken opacity

retouch face skin blur pore wrinkle sharpen smooth photoshop

For software you can always: Add a minus for words that are coming up you don't want: -price -cost -buy etc.. Add words that you think would not be in a bogus page.

I thought this post was going to be about how google changed it's search so that it no longer searches for only the exact words you put in. Not sure when this changed but I've noticed it for almost a year now maybe.

For instance, putting in the word 'read' will also pull results with 'reading'.
Of course you can put in "read" (using the quotes) to stop that but if I wanted to find pages with 'reading' I would have typed that in myself. It's just annoying to me. They call it 'stemming'.

I used google last night to find tutes on writing in sand. All I put in was 'photoshop sand writing'. Seeing that one tute came up over and over it was easy to see that the most prevalent result (showing up on 5 billion sites) had the word 'beloved' on the pages... so I added '-beloved' to my search to filter it out :) I don't have any problems finding something I want using google. However it sometimes does take a 2nd, 3rd, 4th and even 5th modification of my original search string to find what I'm looking for. For more than a year now (I think) there have been tons and tons of useless wasteland sites that are nothing but pages filled with common search strings.
http://www.google.com/sitemap.html - if anyone isn't familiar with how to modify your search strings you can find some help under 'search guides' on that page.

I use a FF plug-in called Customize Google http://www.customizegoogle.com/
Doesn't help with some of the problems Doug's quoted, but does allow you to filter out the Ads (sponsored links), and also to cross link to other search engines plus a lot of other useful customisations.

I found this site through google.

Retouch Pro's "Library" is a subject directory, which is a collection of websites selected by people. The result is a database of quality sites. Because of the human involvement in building a subject directory, the resulting database is small.

A Search Engine's database (like Google) is a collection of websites gathered by computer. The result is a large database of good, bad, and ugly sites. A search returns millions of "hits" but the searcher needs to determine if the links are related to his search and/or if the sites are "quality" sites.

One advantage of using a subject directory --- it can save you time because someone, rather than something has selected the sites and the results are really about your subject.

The Web contains a number of subject directories. In fact, Google offers a subject directory (The Open Directory Project) that is subject arranged and claims to be "the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory on the web".
http://www.google.com/dirhp

Searching Computers --- Software resulted in thousands of good links.

A few other Subject Directories are:

Librarian Index to the Internet: Websites You Can Trust
http://lii.org/

Digital Librarian: a librarian's choice of the best on the web
http://www.digital-librarian.com/

INFOMINE: Scholarly Internet Resource Collections
http://infomine.ucr.edu/

I realize that you may not appreciate this if you have never worked in a large corporate environment.

"Google" might be the first inanimate object to fall prey to the Peter Principle....you will eventually be promoted to your lowest-level of incompetence.

Which leads to my own corollary, Brad's First Corollary to the Peter Principle: "The amount of time you spend in one level of management is directly proportional to your degree of incompetence".

Which leads to my second corollary, Brad's Second Corollary to the Peter Principle: "Show me a long-time manager and I'll show you an incompetent one." :rolleyes:

Let me say that they broke me before the Peter Principle could occur. :lol: