First of, I agree that it's not quite "searching without pagerank".
> It's just telling the search engine to ignore the first X results
Nope, a lot of people seem to be confused about this:
It doesn't drop the first X results, but it removes the top X most popular websites from its index--the same ones for every query.
That's why this technique works so well, even if you just drop the top 1000 most popular websites, most of these sites you have probably already seen many times and/or know about. So by dropping them, you're ensured to get results that are fresh and new.
Of course how well this works for you really depends on what kind of ~seeker you are. If you're the kind of person that searches Google only to click on the first Wikipedia link instead of searching Wikipedia straight away (assuming you got a shortcut for that), these shortslashed searches will turn out disappointing.
"But before I did the search, I didn't know yet that Wikipedia would be the most useful result!", some might say. But they probably knew whether they were looking for a download page, company address or a definition/explanation, right? In the last case, how often did your top 10 Google results contain a useful result that was not Wikipedia? Not that often, in my experience. Usually you get some other links from About.com, Dictionary.com, and some stores like Apple or Amazon. Usually there's just one obvious correct result among the 10, or it's just not there and your search is going to be a frustrating one because tweaking keywords to improve your results has become impossibly unintuitive with Google's recent "I know what you really mean" approach.
So that's another thing, as long as you know when you want to head straight for a tried-and-true reference (wikipedia, dictionary, HN search--I find DDG's !bang searches useful for these when I don't have them configured as shortcuts yet), not only does removing the top X sites give you fresh and new results, also your first page of results will be a varied palette out of the possible interpretations of your keywords (which you can use to refine), instead of a unity sausage (aka, a UNOX).
> It's just telling the search engine to ignore the first X results
Nope, a lot of people seem to be confused about this:
It doesn't drop the first X results, but it removes the top X most popular websites from its index--the same ones for every query.
That's why this technique works so well, even if you just drop the top 1000 most popular websites, most of these sites you have probably already seen many times and/or know about. So by dropping them, you're ensured to get results that are fresh and new.
Of course how well this works for you really depends on what kind of ~seeker you are. If you're the kind of person that searches Google only to click on the first Wikipedia link instead of searching Wikipedia straight away (assuming you got a shortcut for that), these shortslashed searches will turn out disappointing.
"But before I did the search, I didn't know yet that Wikipedia would be the most useful result!", some might say. But they probably knew whether they were looking for a download page, company address or a definition/explanation, right? In the last case, how often did your top 10 Google results contain a useful result that was not Wikipedia? Not that often, in my experience. Usually you get some other links from About.com, Dictionary.com, and some stores like Apple or Amazon. Usually there's just one obvious correct result among the 10, or it's just not there and your search is going to be a frustrating one because tweaking keywords to improve your results has become impossibly unintuitive with Google's recent "I know what you really mean" approach.
So that's another thing, as long as you know when you want to head straight for a tried-and-true reference (wikipedia, dictionary, HN search--I find DDG's !bang searches useful for these when I don't have them configured as shortcuts yet), not only does removing the top X sites give you fresh and new results, also your first page of results will be a varied palette out of the possible interpretations of your keywords (which you can use to refine), instead of a unity sausage (aka, a UNOX).