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Comment by labster | Hacker News Reader

It’s the final day of the free tier of Google Apps they promised they would never take away from me. I run a web search where the engine ignores my excluded terms[1]. Sad. But the I log into Gmail. Another redesign, thank goodness! Too bad I can’t XMPP message my friends to tell them about it.

[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=49ers+-football+-nfl

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Are you talking about the free lifetime Google Apps for Your Domain? They did announce that they were canceling it, but they reversed course and you can still keep it by pressing this button: https://support.google.com/a/answer/2855120

I actually closed my account when they first announced the cancellation, which made things more difficult and I had to contact support to get it back (I was successful). But if you haven't done that, I believe all you need to do is press that button.

I've been trying to press that button for my own Google Apps account. It simply doesn't work.

It only works if you originally had the lifetime free apps for your domain, and you haven't transitioned to another offering already. If you did, then you have to contact support to transition back.

Beware of the leopard!

Thanks. I'd already started paying for it, and now it looks like I won't have to anymore.

I swear the excluded terms are interpreted as “not this word, but still related to it”

Strictly speaking, aren't the results for "49ers -football -nfl" correct if using literal term exclusion? None of those pages have the term football or nfl. But I see what you mean in principle, Google seems all-to-eager to use fancy NLP and knowledge graph to rewrite queries, so it would be fair if they exposed a way to exclude categories as well.

There is actually a free tier. I was confused too, but you have to insert payment and then change your subscription to the free one afterwards.

https://support.google.com/a/answer/2855120?hl=en

There's actually a button on the “show me the options” page that lets you declare you're actually a person, without entering CC info.

I'm not so sure. I used that months ago, and they're still sending me $0 bills that sure look like they're about to become real bills.

I just clicked your link and it says "you already have the no cost option". So we'll see what happens next month.

I definitely didn't have to pretend to pay them when I elected this option, you just affirmed you were using the account for personal use and everything stayed the same basically.

After starting to ignore the "not" operator, I can't wait until Google decides it no longer has to listen to the double quote "exact phrase" operator so I can finally ditch it for good.

Double quote is long gone for me on Google.

Fails to exclude results without the text, and ignores known results with it.

I suppose they just expect us to eat the dogfood we are served

It already doesn't

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