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my problem is some operators just dont work any more, either on purpose or because of crappy quality control. for example, you used to be able to do:

    allintitle:Neil Diamond If You Go Away

on YouTube, and get exactly what you would think, results with all those words in the title. but now, you dont:

https://youtube.com/results?search_query=allintitle:Neil+Dia...

now, I get crap like this:

    Neil Diamond & Shirley Bassey - Play Me - "high quality"
    Barbra Streisand - If You Go Away (Ne Me Quitte Pas)

how is that what I searched for? also, what is this:

> A search for [site:nytimes.com] will work, but [site:nytimes.com] won't.

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433

did I just have a stroke? those two searches are exactly the same. I try to be understanding, but I am constantly tripping over big companies glaring software and/or documentation issues, it gets old.

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> https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433

> those two searches are exactly the same

Yes, that appears to be a recently-introduced typo -- the archived version from April does have a space: https://web.archive.org/web/20230412181331/https://support.g...

I submitted a feedback comment, hopefully they'll fix the typo.

(For future reference, here is a snapshot of the current version without a space: https://web.archive.org/web/20230722085337/https://support.g...)

Has anyone else experienced DuckDuckGo ignoring the exclusion operator? For example, searching `kiwi -fruit`, with no space between the hyphen and second word, used to bring up results that did not include the word "fruit". This no longer seems to be the case.

Someone needs to build a meta search engine…

At least one existed in the dot com era. Forget the name.

metacrawler, IIRC.

searx/searxng?

> duckduckgo ... exclusion operator

Removed a few weeks ago.

Somebody posted in these pages the github diff showing the removal of the options.

> did I just have a stroke? those two searches are exactly the same.

I just had the exact same though while reading the page.

The fact Google's own documentation is this poorly kept is a astonishing.

Makes me a firm believer companies should have their documentation on GitHub (or similar) so anyone can make a PR to tidy these things up.

The one not working has a space after the colon. It's even in the section taking about this :)

no, it doesn't.

It looks like it's damaged in the English translation/version.

In a few other languages I checked it has :)

Agree. This even applies to simple Booleans, which are sometimes completely ignored.

I sometimes wonder about PMs who sign off on decisions like these, and the seeming lack of protest the developers put up.

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