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Ask HN: Why do search engines ignore the exclusion operator now “-”?
Google, Bing, Duckduckgo, Yahoo, it seems like all of them have decided to stop honoring the "-". Surround things by quotes, add them multiple times, it doesn't seem to matter.
Are there any decent search engines that do what you actually say left instead of extremely poorly trying to guess what you mean?
- bjourne 6y agoBecause negation is incredibly expensive in any information retrieval system. You want all recipes with blue cheese in them? That's easy. You want all recipes with no blue cheese in them? That's a massive number of recipes.
- solus_factor 6y agoQuotes are also pretty much ignored now. I don't know why.
- aww_dang 6y ago-"negative keyword" appears to work for me
- blackcats 6y agoDon’t know, some spam sites show up in my google search like codegrepper. Sticking with queckqueckgo i guess
- decasteve 6y agoThe cynical take: They'll do what's profitable over what's accurate.
- mxmilkb 6y agoI noticed it's like this on Amazon the other day. It meant I couldn't narrow down results to find what I wanted so I could give Amazon money
- scrollaway 6y agoThis isn't a cynical comment, it's just nonsensical in this context. It's like replying "it's more profitable this way" to "why are chopsticks popular in asian culture".
- Ulus 6y agoI just did a google search for “league of -legends” (sans quotes) and it didn’t return links to the game.
- kristopolous 6y agoThis is absolutely true. I wonder why I always hit the edge cases.
- rozab 6y agoI use this feature all the time. Maybe you're getting A/B tested?
- kristopolous 6y agoI try to use it all the time. I've done crude things like written browser plugins to sift through results and remove things because the search engines just ignore it. The worst thing is when I'm trying to remove garbage results so things like "free account" or "need to signup" for a bunch of spam sites. Those things are always ignored. It's stupid that I need to essentially groom my results with my own code.
- matt_heimer 6y agoGoogle still has it documented on https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433 https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433 and there is a none of these words option on https://www.google.com/advanced_search https://www.google.com/advanced_search Make sure you aren't putting the minus symbol in quotes. The quotes are what I see people get wrong. Many people still try to use the + symbol to indicate required but Google disabled that when working on Google+ and switched to quotes to indicate required words or phrases.