Edit: i’ll update this list of search engines that are alleged (up to you, the Reader, to verify) not to respect special search operators:
- owoarchist said Google
Keep your previous search terms but add “NOT” then whatever the word thats coming up that you want to exclude from search results since its not relevant to what you’re looking for
I just intuited and put this to use a moment ago and it works and helped filter down things substantially
In search engines that actually respect your query, yes.
But not in Google.
Yes, please dont use GOOG
Added it to my list in the body
Google works if you put a minus ( - ) in front of the word you want omitted, without a space.
For example: correctword -wrongword
It will show searches with “correctword” but omit any search results that also have “wrongword” in it.
EDIT: But yes, don’t use Google if you can.
I don’t know, here it used to work all the time no matter what, but in the last few years not so much - for example when I search ‘thing I need to buy -mercadolibre*’ it will show ‘mercadolibre’ results regardless. For technical, scientific or nerdy queries it still almost always works
*mercadolibre being some sort of an “argentinian amazon alternative” with really aggresive seo and shitty practices and shameless greed too
Nah, Google stopped taking search queries literally a while ago.
Now it takes your query, uses some opaque (and probably now AI-infested) algorithms to decide what you want based on both the query and all the information they have about you, and then instead of showing you exactly what you searched for, it shows you what their algorithm thinks you want (after you get past the first page of mostly sponsored results and what Google wants you to want).
On most search engines you can use the syntax -Cuck to exclude Cuck porn and you can put “Team sports” in quotation marks like so to ensure only pages with that phrase will be shown
Which search engine?
All of them.
e: perhaps I sounded flippant. I didn’t mean to, so let me apologise and clarify: this has been a thing for a long time, and every search engine implemented this a long time ago. It’s pretty standard. There are some regex style things you can do in pretty much all of them, too, partly because it’s sort of free in the codebases they all use deep down. I don’t want to be too technical, but the ‘x NOT y’ thing is so basic, all search engines of any size (even homegrown ones on one-off websites that aren’t using SDKs for whatever reason) implement this basically on day 1. I’ve implemented this myself in homespun proprietary search engines within homespun proprietary software decades ago.
There are a bunch more ‘commands’ like this, many of which are universal.
