44 ms·

I believe its origins lie in the fact that spaces get converted to + in the URL. I always found it weird when I saw others using plus instead of spaces in thei

by adhipg 15y ago

I believe its origins lie in the fact that spaces get converted to + in the URL. I always found it weird when I saw others using plus instead of spaces in their search queries. I always used double quotes to mark phrases to search for exactly.

bittermang 15y ago
I use quotes for exact phrases, when I see my results returning a lot of things out of the order of what I'm looking for. I use (or used to use) + to strictly require a single word in my results, when I notice for some odd reason my results seemed to have skipped that word entirely. Conversely, and it appears this still works, I use - to strip out words that are clogging up my results.
- adhipg 15y ago
  I have always found that double quotes were good enough to specify inclusion and I did always use '-' to specify omission. Thinking about that, I do now get your use case. Can Google try and make + a double operator? We know that G+ only allows you to have your real names on your profiles and the '+' for G+ is to specify a person. Maybe Google will treat the '+' as a G+ only if it has a relevant profile to show and otherwise leave it like it is?
  - jaylevitt 15y ago
    That actually seems like something that Google should be good at. In "The Plex", they talk at great length about the bigram/trigram problem (New vs. New York vs. New York Times) and the context of deciding when you're searching for a person versus a term.
DanBC 15y ago
I want this "exact phrase" - which Google might auto-correct to something similar or may drop altogether if there's enough evidence the page they want to return is what I want, even if it does not have that exact phrase. I really want this +"exact phrase", and it must appear. I appreciate that Google works better for regular users now. But I'm struggling to cope with Google's changing search techniques. Combined with content farms; link farms; lousy quality web pages in general; a weird amount of ads and other un-wanted content (youtube, images, etc. Why bother with the tabs if they just get pushed on top of my search anyway?) There really truly is a niche for a different Google version for advanced users. Allow optional stemming, don't just automatically drop stemmed words in. Allow bracketing of terms +(this OR that) +(up OR down). etc etc etc.

by adhipg 15y ago

bittermang 15y ago

I use quotes for exact phrases, when I see my results returning a lot of things out of the order of what I'm looking for. I use (or used to use) + to strictly require a single word in my results, when I notice for some odd reason my results seemed to have skipped that word entirely. Conversely, and it appears this still works, I use - to strip out words that are clogging up my results.

adhipg 15y ago
I have always found that double quotes were good enough to specify inclusion and I did always use '-' to specify omission. Thinking about that, I do now get your use case. Can Google try and make + a double operator? We know that G+ only allows you to have your real names on your profiles and the '+' for G+ is to specify a person. Maybe Google will treat the '+' as a G+ only if it has a relevant profile to show and otherwise leave it like it is?
- jaylevitt 15y ago
  That actually seems like something that Google should be good at. In "The Plex", they talk at great length about the bigram/trigram problem (New vs. New York vs. New York Times) and the context of deciding when you're searching for a person versus a term.

DanBC 15y ago

I want this "exact phrase" - which Google might auto-correct to something similar or may drop altogether if there's enough evidence the page they want to return is what I want, even if it does not have that exact phrase. I really want this +"exact phrase", and it must appear. I appreciate that Google works better for regular users now. But I'm struggling to cope with Google's changing search techniques. Combined with content farms; link farms; lousy quality web pages in general; a weird amount of ads and other un-wanted content (youtube, images, etc. Why bother with the tabs if they just get pushed on top of my search anyway?) There really truly is a niche for a different Google version for advanced users. Allow optional stemming, don't just automatically drop stemmed words in. Allow bracketing of terms +(this OR that) +(up OR down). etc etc etc.