even if they enforce solid colors...

[darkoshi]

...kids will still want to swap for a different color or style.

This search phrase returns what I was looking for on DuckDuckGo, but not on Google:
school facemask "paw patrol" spiderman lunch swap

That is unusual, and speaks well of DDG. Replacing "facemask" with "mask" brings back the wanted result on Google too, but it's odd that their algorithms aren't doing that replacement automatically. Normally Google returns as many or more relevant results for me than DDG, but not this time.

This is what I was looking for, a wryly prophetic* tweet I'd seen shared on FB yesterday:

You gon send your kid to school with the Paw Patrol mask and he gon come home with a Spider Man mask because he made a trade at lunch. Whole school gon be shut down the next day.

*I'd have written premoniscient, but the dictionaries are telling me that isn't a word no matter how much it sounds like one to me. "Premonitory" is a word but it doesn't sound right to me at all. "Prescient" is also a word, but isn't exactly the meaning I intended.

..

Auditory illusion, "Brainstorm or Green Needle?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pRY3wlKwm8

I only hear green needle. The first part could be either brain or green; those words sound similar. But how can the 2nd part possibly be "storm"? - it has clearly 2 syllables!? Even if I stretch out "storm" in my mind to be as long as 2 syllables, it sounds nothing at all like the sound in the video clip.

Comments

[lhexan]

I'm fed up with both Google and DDG now. Google because I can no longer do searches like "fox site:lhexa.dreamwidth.org", and DDG because there's no option for Boolean AND. I'm trying out Startpage now, which does have that operator.

[darkoshi]

That search "fox site:lhexa.dreamwidth.org" works as I'd expect on Google today.

I seem to remember site: not working at some point too. Maybe they removed the functionality for a while, then added it back?
You can also limit results to one site via: https://www.google.com/advanced_search

Per this: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/syntax/
to do a boolean AND on DDG, use a plus sign.

I don't use boolean AND in searches, as I expect the search engine to list the pages with all my search terms before pages with only some of the terms anyway. I do use the minus sign on occasion, to exclude pages with certain words from the results.

[lhexan]

What the hell. I checked that Google search just before posting my comment to make sure I wasn't making a false claim.

As for DuckDuckGo, I discovered that the plus sign doesn't change the search to an AND, it just weights the results more heavily towards the term with the plus.

Anyway, I don't have enough experience with Startpage yet to offer an evaluation.

[darkoshi]

> As for DuckDuckGo, I discovered that the plus sign doesn't change the search to an AND, it just weights the results more heavily towards the term with the plus.

It seemed to work pretty good when I tested it the other day, although the results were about the same as not using the plus sign.
Today I tried a different set of search terms ("aardvarks +donkeys"), and it puts several results with only one of the terms in between the results with both terms. So yeah, that doesn't work as well as I'd like either.

Google wins hands-down on that search though (without plus signs); it returns a WHOLE bunch of pages with both terms.

I wasn't familiar with StartPage, but looking at it now, they used to be IxQuick, which I still have on my homepage/bookmark list from long ago! :)
I never used IxQuick much as it didn't give many good results. But that was a long time ago; I may try it out again.