4 ms·
The Art of Googling
- presidentscroob 7y agoI'm disappointed by the deprecation and decay of features of DDG and Goog in recent years, it seems like the trend is toward dumbing-down. It used to be that double-quoted strings meant "search for exactly this, not fuzzy searches". Now, DDG requires a plus sign in front of a double-quoted string. +"KS-19319ZJFT" Also, way, way back, you could conduct elaborate boolean searches like (space equals implicit "and", so it's omitted): site:foo.com -site:docs.foo.com ((lemons "crab apples") or ((oranges beans) (cherries plums))) Ideally, I'd like a syntax that looks like this: search = "( search ")" | "-" search | search ("and")? search | search "or" search | constraint | term term = quoted_term | simple_term quoted_term = '"'([^"\\]|'\\"')+'"' | "'"([^'\\]|"\\'")+"'" simple_term = [^'" ]+ constraint = file_type_constraint | url_constraint | site_constraint | temporal_constraint file_type_constraint = "filetype:" (common_type|"*"?"."?[a-z0-9]+) | "mimetype:" regex common_type = "video"|"photo"|"audio"|"email"|"web"|"document"|"text" url_constraint = "inurl:" regex site_constraint = "site:" regex time_constraint = "before:" date | "after:" date | "within:" time /* "and," "or," and : prefixes should be case-insensitive and localizable */ /* date, time and regex are "exercises for the reader" ;) */