Ask HN: Why do search engines ignore the exclusion operator now “-”? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why do search engines ignore the exclusion operator now “-”?

20 pointskristopolous14 comments

Google, Bing, Duckduckgo, Yahoo, it seems like all of them have decided to stop honoring the "-". Surround things by quotes, add them multiple times, it doesn't seem to matter.

Are there any decent search engines that do what you actually say left instead of extremely poorly trying to guess what you mean?

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Google still has it documented on https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433 and there is a none of these words option on https://www.google.com/advanced_search

Make sure you aren't putting the minus symbol in quotes. The quotes are what I see people get wrong. Many people still try to use the + symbol to indicate required but Google disabled that when working on Google+ and switched to quotes to indicate required words or phrases.

I just did a google search for “league of -legends” (sans quotes) and it didn’t return links to the game.

This is absolutely true. I wonder why I always hit the edge cases.

Quotes are also pretty much ignored now. I don't know why.

I use this feature all the time. Maybe you're getting A/B tested?

I try to use it all the time. I've done crude things like written browser plugins to sift through results and remove things because the search engines just ignore it.

The worst thing is when I'm trying to remove garbage results so things like "free account" or "need to signup" for a bunch of spam sites. Those things are always ignored.

It's stupid that I need to essentially groom my results with my own code.

Because negation is incredibly expensive in any information retrieval system. You want all recipes with blue cheese in them? That's easy. You want all recipes with no blue cheese in them? That's a massive number of recipes.

Still less than all the recipes, which would also be a valid search so I don't think this point stands.

What query do you use to get Google to list all documents in its index?

Don’t know, some spam sites show up in my google search like codegrepper. Sticking with queckqueckgo i guess

-"negative keyword"

appears to work for me

The cynical take:

They'll do what's profitable over what's accurate.

This isn't a cynical comment, it's just nonsensical in this context.

It's like replying "it's more profitable this way" to "why are chopsticks popular in asian culture".

I noticed it's like this on Amazon the other day. It meant I couldn't narrow down results to find what I wanted so I could give Amazon money

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