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Comment by worble | Hacker News Reader

Google actually honors that for you? It seems for me that no matter how hard I try to tell it that I _absolutely_ want an exact search term, it tells me to go fuck myself and returns results that don't include it. DDG seems to do a much better job at honoring this.

Look Google, if you can't find any pages with my search term, it's OK to return nothing! That's valid! It means I need to change my query! Stop trying to make a square peg fit a round hole!

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> Google actually honors that for you?

It works exactly as expected. If you want an exact match you need to quote the search terms.

    "Kubuntu" OR "KDE" -gnome site:ubuntuforums.com

It may work for that query but it doesn't work for the query in general, especially with multiple words.

I run into this frequently when searching error messages. Quoting the error is useless, it still returns pages that contain parts of the quoted string.

I don't encounter this behavior unless there are 0 results for the quoted version.

Doesn't work for every term, or for every person.

When Google ignores it for me, it is usually on "high value" terms, with lots of potential ad views.

But to say "It works exactly as expected" is only correct for you and your machine.

Putting terms in double quotes works perfectly for me on Google, forcing results to contain the exact term. I use this very often and never have problems with it. So it's puzzling to see comments that it doesn't work.

I've had many cases where I put exact terms in double quotes, but the Google search results still contained pages that do not contain the quoted text at all. It doesn't happen often, but it's often enough to be frustrating.

I'm with you. Google not only show results where your quotation-marked token is not present but will also include results with synonyms to your token.

I think I'll analyze my browser history of Google searches that are similar enough because I'm tweaking the query to match what I want.

This has absolutely happened to me as well and was one of the biggest things that pushed me to switch to DDG.

Before resorting to tossing swear words at third party readers, consider providing at least one example of the problem you are having trouble with.

Amen, brother!

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