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Comment by inlikealamb | Hacker News Reader

It's a Google feature that isn't very smart... adding a dash before a word will exclude results containing that word

I suspect it trips up people that don't know this more than it's actually used.

It's not that the "-" prefix is just a harmless undocumented feature that only (a few) people who know about it use, it's more that it's an insidious undocumented foot gun that shoots (most) people who don't know about it when they use it accidentally.

Google should at least show a user friendly help message at the top of the page, that actually teaches users about the filtering feature, and lets you turn it off, like:

    Results containing "webkit-match-parent" omitted because of "-" prefix. (Click to include.)

But that would reduce the ad surface area by a tiny amount, so oh well...

They'd probably solve most of their problems by simply recognizing that a single term with a - isn't an exclusion, because it returns no results. That's like... a 10 minute regex fix

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