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Teaching a child to use Google will show you that there is indeed quite a learning curve. It is not intuitive how you evaluate your results and refine your search to get good results.

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That's possibly just inexperience on the child's part

I was explaining to an adult yesterday that using -x will remove x from his google results. He was stoked! Then he concluded further that he could use +x too!

I hated to have to disappoint him.

IIRC +x keeps google from returning results that exclude the x term.

e.g. "x y z" ~ "x y z" + "x y" + "y z" + "x z" + "x" + "y" + "z"

where "+x y +z" ~ "x y z" + "x z"

Still, I would imagine this isn't exactly the behavior your friend would have expected.

I was referring to the Google+ fiasco and how + is no longer an operator. Instead, now you have to "quote" "for" "inclusion".

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topicsearchin/webse...

What? The claim was that it doesn't require learning to use. If lack of experience is detrimental, then it needs to be learned.

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