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


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.