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Comment by devjungle | Hacker News Reader

This must be a recent change? It's been driving me nuts lately. I have to resort to adding a lot of negated search terms to compensate but it's still sub optimal.

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No, this has been the case for a long time, years anyway. I don't know if it goes back quite as far as when they removed the '+' operator tho.

But bejesus, this drives me nuts! If I know the double quotes function even exists, then Google should know I actually want to use it as intended - it shouldn't decide "yeah, but maybe you'd like these irrelevant results too!"

I think it’s primarily for people copying and pasting something like an error message, which may have user-specific data in quotes. That should be what “not many results for...” is for, but Google is always trying to optimize away those clicks. Maybe they could add a “programatic” search feature with documented syntax for power users.

A moderate-length string of quoted words (>5?) used to return zero or near zero results and a suggestion to try without quotes- imo ideal

Power users aren't where the money is.

Maybe they should go back to +

Add? They used to have one and actively removed it.

I am always surprised that these systems are not more friendly to engineers, since they were built by them. You'd think for their own sakes they'd stick in a system like xkcd.com/806/

Use 'verbatim'. It's a drop down option, and it isn't as good as the old + or other operators (deprecated because of Google Plus). For example, with verbatim you can't only + one single thing in a search.

Regardless, I basically just always search with verbatim on. Google is mostly useless otherwise.

Thank you. I quickly changed my default Chrome search to https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&tbs=li:1 instead of regular Google

It seems to me that after a few negated search terms are included, they are taken less strictly; "minus" seems to mean "probably minus".

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