This also happens if you search for, say, -1 1. At the time of this comment, there has been multiple people hypothesizing behaviors like "confuses it" or "causi

This also happens if you search for, say, -1 1. At the time of this comment, there has been multiple people hypothesizing behaviors like "confuses it" or "causing a loop". I offer a possible explanation more grounded in information retrieval basics. Yes, one indeed is including and excluding the search term, ensuring that no results satisfy the query. Why does this take so long? Probably, Google evaluates a query until it retrieves the 30 or so most relevant results and returns them. But with the contradictory query, none are found, and so the retrieval continues until it times out. But if you should try "-13 13", we do get results; this suggests that there is a mode of retrieval gated by the query terms being more than one character in length. If we should try, say, "q -q", the number of results and retrieval time does not pop up. however, it seems to take comparably long to execute. Trying out "c -c", however, we still get the no. of results display, along with the retrieval time. A card also pops up showing the calculation as interpreting c to be the speed of light. Thus it seems that the results counter and retrieval time is displated whenever Google has something to say regarding the query, even if it is not a search result; but it does not display it when it has absolutely nothing to say. But even if it has nothing to say, it still spends the same large amount of time attempting to retrieve results.