14 ms·

The Feature Google Killed The + Command For Is Now Dead

167 points by fraqed 12y ago

Tiksi 12y ago
>For example, a search for the word mars generates about 207 million matches. That would find pages that have the exact word plus pages that might not have the word but are deemed related to it. >Searching for mars surrounded by quotes — “mars” — generates exactly the same number, even though that number should drop. As far as I know, that number is just an estimate, and is wildly inaccurate for the actual amount of results. It's the same reason you could have a search with 10 pages of results shown at first, but after you get to page 3, you only see 4 pages of results. It just estimates it until in needs a more accurate count. I can't find the original source for this, though I didn't spend much time looking, but found this on stackoverflow[0]: >From a Google developer (Matt Cutts, head of the web spam team): >"We try to be very clear that our results estimates are just that--estimates. In theory we could spend cycles on that aspect of our system, but in practice we have a lot of other things to work on, and more accurate results estimates is lower on the list than lots of other things" [0] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4397292/how-does-google-count-and-estimate-the-number-of-a-search-results* http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4397292/how-does-google-c... Edit:formatting
danmaz74 12y ago
I've never been a google+ basher, but I really hated Google dropping the + search operator. It also showed me in a very personal way just how lazy users can be: Wrapping a word in double quotes is "just" 4 keystrokes instead of 1 for the + in front of it, but I effectively stopped using that feature after the change.
- reitanqild 12y ago
  The bigger problem was it showed very clearly googles lack of care for search power users. The plus operator was just one problem. Soon after they started fuzzing words in doubleqoutes and at some point they even fuzzed verbatim searches. (Luckily it now works to some degree again.)
  - ht_th 12y ago
    The bigger problem is that you, as a user, don't have any control over internet search. Not only are you dependent on Google (or another provider) for what search commands you can execute, you also don't have no control about how these commands work nor on what subset of the database. Especially advanced features, complex queries, or power tools for searching are unavailable to the common user. I have no idea about the (development of the) quality of the search query + results. I have no idea how to measure that (over time). I suppose I could write a personalized search engine that runs queries I care about regularly on different engines, aggregate the results, write some code to analyze, monitor, and visualize all that, and start running my own valuing algorithms to determine the quality and depth of Internet searches. Space and computation power are cheap nowadays, so for certain well-specified domains, this might be feasible?
    - k__ 12y ago
      What about p2p search engines? Are they any good?
      - dublinben 12y ago
        Yacy is usable right now, and gets better the more people use it. http://yacy.net/en/ http://yacy.net/en/
    - 7952 12y ago
      What is lacking are easy ways to make vertical specific search engines. You are never going to make a better valuing algorithm than Google for general purpose search. A system designed by domain experts should be able to beat Google most of the time within their own tiny niche.
      - diydsp 12y ago
        I've said this before, but google search is turning into the yellow pages.
      - ht_th 12y ago
- InclinedPlane 12y ago
  The shitty thing was that they dropped the + operator at the same time they significantly increased the "fuzziness" of their search algorithm. For some searches it might have helped, but for extremely targeted or highly technical searches it was a disaster. Almost as horrible as the bad old days when search engines tended to use "or" for search queries instead of "and". Still it's very, very difficult to tell google that you actually for really really realsies want to search for all the terms you typed in.
  - vanderZwan 12y ago
    DuckDuckGo fits very neatly in this niche, btw (although it has its own flaws of course).
  - userbinator 12y ago
    Agreed 100%. It's extremely frustrating to have your search engine second-guessing you and making assumptions about what you really want. If the majority of people don't know how to use a search engine correctly, maybe we should focus on teaching them how to use one, instead of dumbing down the search engine so it gives only "OK" results for stupid queries and is nearly useless for people who know what they really want. I know at least the "introduction to the Internet" courses used to teach how to use search engines effectively, i.e. use precise search queries, +/-/boolean operators, etc; don't know if they do anymore. I hope this isn't the case, but to me it almost feels like they're trying to deliberately make it more difficult to find exact information on what you're searching for, and that makes it harder for people to get the information they need to make informed decisions, so they can be more easily persuaded to think what companies like Google want them to. For a lot of people, Google is how they view the Internet - in some ways, Google is the Internet for them. Google has immense control over what and how people can find things on the Internet, and that is what I find most truly quite worrying.
  - ninkendo 12y ago
    Sometimes when I'm searching I get the feeling Google is dropping things I'm asking for in order to give me more results. But there's no way they're dumb enough to think that's helpful, right? They do understand that people want less - but more relevant - results, instead of just having more useless ones? Like just the other day I was searching for "ruby net::ldap <some error message>" and it decided to put, front and center, results from CPAN. Just about as irrelevant as a search result can get. The little grey highlights below the results had "ruby" listed with a strikethrough, to imply that if I had only searched without that word, I could have gotten these helpful results on my own. I can only hope that this behavior was not a conscious decision by anyone at Google. I hope it's because they added some machine learning or something to their algorithms and this was just some emergent behavior they hadn't accounted for. Because if somebody working for a search engine company decides that irrelevant search results are a good thing, or that number of results are by any means a useful metric, I'm scared for the future of Google.
- pasbesoin 12y ago
  It's been a while and I don't feel like digging up the details, but double quoting is not equivalent to what the former plus operator accomplished. Broadly stated, double quoting permits more fuzziness that the former plus operator did. And there are times -- particularly with all the cruft in search results -- when you -- I, at least -- really don't want that fuzziness.
AshleysBrain 12y ago
mars - 197m results "mars" - 228m results +mars - 19k results +"mars" - 197m results Assuming the estimated result count is at all meaningful, it looks like + still does have an effect: it turns ["x"] in to meaning the same thing as [x].
- ttctciyf 12y ago
  So, I was skeptical that only 19k webpages would contain the actual word mars (as per the +mars query), and curious why "verbatim" search wasn't included for comparison. So I tried verbatim search for mars, to find the estimated results count disappears. However, skipping along the pages got me the counterintuitive result that verbatim search for mars finds only 188 results - I'm pretty sure that google has indexed more mars-mentioning pages than that! Oh, not counting the "very similar" results: > In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 188 already displayed. Clicking this "include similar results" link gets me 45 results pages or about 450 results that mention mars found with a verbatim search. I feel like I've gone back to 1994!
  - esbonsa 12y ago
    I seriously think that Google's end-goal is to show you only one sponsored result per search query whether it is relevant or not (there will be no real search results, it will be more like TV)
  - magicalist 12y ago
    Google has never given you all 18 million or whatever results that it says it has for a term. If you look at just mars (no quotes), it says (for me, not signed in) there are 211,000,000 results, but the results only go to page 26 with the same kind of message: "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 260 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included." even though obviously there are more results that aren't "very similar" to the 260 that have been displayed. The assumption has always been that people don't keep clicking through tens of pages of results...they refine their search terms.
0x0 12y ago
The Verbatim search option often isn't verbatim enough. Also it can't be combined with a time limited search; selecting "last month" clears the verbatim option :(
- Kleinlieu 12y ago
  So true. I run into this when needing to debug some weird stack trace error but have recently run into google fuzzing my "" exact searches. Now I know I'm not the only one
mcintyre1994 12y ago
I don't see why that feature needed to change the normal + feature anyway. Couldn't they differentiate between it being at the start and in the middle? It'd be obvious for power users from the recommendations. That said I can see the argument for just supporting single word quotes and to me that seems more intuitive.
- Kiro 12y ago
  But it would be at the start in many cases. How would it know if you want to go to the Google+ site of YouTube or just search all the pages that contain the exact phrase "YouTube"?
chris_wot 12y ago
Is there a search engine that is as accurate as Google? Does Bing really stack up?
- mikegioia 12y ago
  I didn't think I ever would, but I've actually been using duck duck go as my primary search engine. However, about 10-20% of searches I need to prepend "!g" to search google instead since DDG isn't fully there yet.
- apricot 12y ago
  Bing has quietly improved a lot and is actually pretty good now, certainly better than its reputation lets on. It's the Zune of search engines.
- marcosdumay 12y ago
  As far as I know, no, there isn't. I've tried going away from Google, but always failed. The problem is that Google clearly care about search less and less each day. If the trend continues, we'll be able to change some day, but not because the other sites got better.
  - Vik1ng 12y ago
    Tried it too. Wasn't that happy. I was also never a fan of different search options in my browser bar so the !bang feature wasn't really my thing either. Now I'm contributing to OpenStreetMap, because I think at least that stands a chance against google maps and might even help some other search engines. DuckDuckGo is using it and maybe Bing will at one point, at least that would explain why they provide aerial images.
- hrktb 12y ago
  For accuracy duckduckgo is leaps and bounds better than google search. But I think what most of the users want from a generic search engine is not accuracy but fuzziness, context and news awaresness. For instance if I search ping pong in google right now, my first result is a currently airing japanese tv series about ping pong (and the show name is not even in the same alphabet I used to search). Duckduckgo returns the english wikipedia article. Also, the title of this article is so messed up...
DanBC 12y ago
Matt Cutts gave some numbers about how often the + operator was used - and even then it was mostly used incorrectly. > > In the past, we provided users with the + operator to help you search for specific terms. However, we found that users typed the + operator in less than half a percent of all searches, and two thirds of the time, it was used incorrectly. http://insidesearch.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/search-using-your-terms-verbatim.html http://insidesearch.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/search-using-your... Check my math, but I think that means that + was used correctly in only 1 out of 600 searches. People mention "power users". Google does not want power users. Google wants a mass market of people who see, and click, ads. EDIT: i guess I need to say that I hated when Google changed the plus operator; and I find using Google now to be a frustrating and annoying experience. I'm shown results tha often are not relevant to my queries. And Barrkel makes a good point about my confusing potentially misleading description of the times + is used correctly.
- barrkel 12y ago
  When you say "+ was used correctly in only 1 out of 600 searches", it seems to imply that it was used incorrectly in 599 out of 600 searches. Your phrasing makes too strong a claim as most people understand the language, IMO. Let's not forget how large an audience any Google feature has, though. + being used correctly, even by 0.33% of users, is still probably a million people.
  - e12e 12y ago
    So, 1 out of every 200 searches contain a "+", possibly for refinement. In 1 out of every three of those searches, the "+" helps the user find what's wanted. No information on a) some users are better at using the "+" correctly than others, b) If removing the "+" means that now three out of three of those searches fail.
    - DanBC 12y ago
      And no information if the correctly used pluses were inserted by humans, deliberately, and were useful. Still, I am surprised that Google has made search so poor for so many people in some situations. Although I understand they've done some work on making programming code easier to search for?
chewxy 12y ago
Did Google really name a feature after a P2P protocol? Coupled with the + symbol I initially thought this was about a file sharing protocol that G killed
annesa 12y ago
Interesting
_greim_ 12y ago
Ha, so this explains it. I hadn't been paying much attention, other than noticing that prepending "+" to google search terms (something I did infrequently to begin with) had started to just return zero results most of the time.
jacquesm 12y ago
"No results" is a feature, not a bug, I'd much rather have no results or very few than a whole pile of crap to wade through in case the real results are buried in there somewhere. Double quotes should translate to 'match this or nothing', what's the point of quoting otherwise. And if the + command is now no longer used then maybe bring back the old usage, which worked just fine. Change for the sake of change is ridiculous, changing a well known user-interface in order to push a non-core product is slightly mad. It also shows how bad it is to have all these services belong to one single company, imagine google+ being launched as facebook+, do you think that google would have dropped their '+' operator for that?
alok-g 12y ago
Response from 'thisisnotatest' from Google search team [1]: "I hear you. How to indicate to the user that we don't think there are any good matches for their query is something we debate and experiment with in search quality at Google." [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7725958 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7725958
joeevans 12y ago
Lol... I never knew the + stopped working... I've been using it all along. I guess I always assumed the search term I was prepending a + to was always in there, somewhere. No doubt I was getting less relevant results. Without a doubt, the '+' operator is the most important one, followed only by being able to search for a phrase surrounded by quotations.
- xor-ed-wolf 12y ago
  It's strange that you did not. WTF moment was the first thing I experienced when they did that and my search with + returned results that didn't contain the word. I was literally furious.
mixmastamyk 12y ago
I may be wrong, but I seem to remember using +word since the AltaVista days. I still do it, even though it doesn't work. (grumble) That and the results changing as I type drive me nuts. It is quite common for me to see something I want only to lose it on the next keystroke which was already queued.

167 points by fraqed 12y ago

Tiksi 12y ago

>For example, a search for the word mars generates about 207 million matches. That would find pages that have the exact word plus pages that might not have the word but are deemed related to it. >Searching for mars surrounded by quotes — “mars” — generates exactly the same number, even though that number should drop. As far as I know, that number is just an estimate, and is wildly inaccurate for the actual amount of results. It's the same reason you could have a search with 10 pages of results shown at first, but after you get to page 3, you only see 4 pages of results. It just estimates it until in needs a more accurate count. I can't find the original source for this, though I didn't spend much time looking, but found this on stackoverflow[0]: >From a Google developer (Matt Cutts, head of the web spam team): >"We try to be very clear that our results estimates are just that--estimates. In theory we could spend cycles on that aspect of our system, but in practice we have a lot of other things to work on, and more accurate results estimates is lower on the list than lots of other things" [0] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4397292/how-does-google-count-and-estimate-the-number-of-a-search-results* http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4397292/how-does-google-c... Edit:formatting

danmaz74 12y ago

I've never been a google+ basher, but I really hated Google dropping the + search operator. It also showed me in a very personal way just how lazy users can be: Wrapping a word in double quotes is "just" 4 keystrokes instead of 1 for the + in front of it, but I effectively stopped using that feature after the change.

reitanqild 12y ago
The bigger problem was it showed very clearly googles lack of care for search power users. The plus operator was just one problem. Soon after they started fuzzing words in doubleqoutes and at some point they even fuzzed verbatim searches. (Luckily it now works to some degree again.)
- ht_th 12y ago
  The bigger problem is that you, as a user, don't have any control over internet search. Not only are you dependent on Google (or another provider) for what search commands you can execute, you also don't have no control about how these commands work nor on what subset of the database. Especially advanced features, complex queries, or power tools for searching are unavailable to the common user. I have no idea about the (development of the) quality of the search query + results. I have no idea how to measure that (over time). I suppose I could write a personalized search engine that runs queries I care about regularly on different engines, aggregate the results, write some code to analyze, monitor, and visualize all that, and start running my own valuing algorithms to determine the quality and depth of Internet searches. Space and computation power are cheap nowadays, so for certain well-specified domains, this might be feasible?
  - k__ 12y ago
    What about p2p search engines? Are they any good?
    - dublinben 12y ago
      Yacy is usable right now, and gets better the more people use it. http://yacy.net/en/ http://yacy.net/en/
  - 7952 12y ago
    What is lacking are easy ways to make vertical specific search engines. You are never going to make a better valuing algorithm than Google for general purpose search. A system designed by domain experts should be able to beat Google most of the time within their own tiny niche.
    - diydsp 12y ago
      I've said this before, but google search is turning into the yellow pages.
    - ht_th 12y ago
InclinedPlane 12y ago
The shitty thing was that they dropped the + operator at the same time they significantly increased the "fuzziness" of their search algorithm. For some searches it might have helped, but for extremely targeted or highly technical searches it was a disaster. Almost as horrible as the bad old days when search engines tended to use "or" for search queries instead of "and". Still it's very, very difficult to tell google that you actually for really really realsies want to search for all the terms you typed in.
- vanderZwan 12y ago
  DuckDuckGo fits very neatly in this niche, btw (although it has its own flaws of course).
- userbinator 12y ago
  Agreed 100%. It's extremely frustrating to have your search engine second-guessing you and making assumptions about what you really want. If the majority of people don't know how to use a search engine correctly, maybe we should focus on teaching them how to use one, instead of dumbing down the search engine so it gives only "OK" results for stupid queries and is nearly useless for people who know what they really want. I know at least the "introduction to the Internet" courses used to teach how to use search engines effectively, i.e. use precise search queries, +/-/boolean operators, etc; don't know if they do anymore. I hope this isn't the case, but to me it almost feels like they're trying to deliberately make it more difficult to find exact information on what you're searching for, and that makes it harder for people to get the information they need to make informed decisions, so they can be more easily persuaded to think what companies like Google want them to. For a lot of people, Google is how they view the Internet - in some ways, Google is the Internet for them. Google has immense control over what and how people can find things on the Internet, and that is what I find most truly quite worrying.
- ninkendo 12y ago
  Sometimes when I'm searching I get the feeling Google is dropping things I'm asking for in order to give me more results. But there's no way they're dumb enough to think that's helpful, right? They do understand that people want less - but more relevant - results, instead of just having more useless ones? Like just the other day I was searching for "ruby net::ldap <some error message>" and it decided to put, front and center, results from CPAN. Just about as irrelevant as a search result can get. The little grey highlights below the results had "ruby" listed with a strikethrough, to imply that if I had only searched without that word, I could have gotten these helpful results on my own. I can only hope that this behavior was not a conscious decision by anyone at Google. I hope it's because they added some machine learning or something to their algorithms and this was just some emergent behavior they hadn't accounted for. Because if somebody working for a search engine company decides that irrelevant search results are a good thing, or that number of results are by any means a useful metric, I'm scared for the future of Google.
pasbesoin 12y ago
It's been a while and I don't feel like digging up the details, but double quoting is not equivalent to what the former plus operator accomplished. Broadly stated, double quoting permits more fuzziness that the former plus operator did. And there are times -- particularly with all the cruft in search results -- when you -- I, at least -- really don't want that fuzziness.

AshleysBrain 12y ago

mars - 197m results "mars" - 228m results +mars - 19k results +"mars" - 197m results Assuming the estimated result count is at all meaningful, it looks like + still does have an effect: it turns ["x"] in to meaning the same thing as [x].

ttctciyf 12y ago
So, I was skeptical that only 19k webpages would contain the actual word mars (as per the +mars query), and curious why "verbatim" search wasn't included for comparison. So I tried verbatim search for mars, to find the estimated results count disappears. However, skipping along the pages got me the counterintuitive result that verbatim search for mars finds only 188 results - I'm pretty sure that google has indexed more mars-mentioning pages than that! Oh, not counting the "very similar" results: > In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 188 already displayed. Clicking this "include similar results" link gets me 45 results pages or about 450 results that mention mars found with a verbatim search. I feel like I've gone back to 1994!
- esbonsa 12y ago
  I seriously think that Google's end-goal is to show you only one sponsored result per search query whether it is relevant or not (there will be no real search results, it will be more like TV)
- magicalist 12y ago
  Google has never given you all 18 million or whatever results that it says it has for a term. If you look at just mars (no quotes), it says (for me, not signed in) there are 211,000,000 results, but the results only go to page 26 with the same kind of message: "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 260 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included." even though obviously there are more results that aren't "very similar" to the 260 that have been displayed. The assumption has always been that people don't keep clicking through tens of pages of results...they refine their search terms.

0x0 12y ago

The Verbatim search option often isn't verbatim enough. Also it can't be combined with a time limited search; selecting "last month" clears the verbatim option :(

Kleinlieu 12y ago
So true. I run into this when needing to debug some weird stack trace error but have recently run into google fuzzing my "" exact searches. Now I know I'm not the only one

mcintyre1994 12y ago

I don't see why that feature needed to change the normal + feature anyway. Couldn't they differentiate between it being at the start and in the middle? It'd be obvious for power users from the recommendations. That said I can see the argument for just supporting single word quotes and to me that seems more intuitive.

Kiro 12y ago
But it would be at the start in many cases. How would it know if you want to go to the Google+ site of YouTube or just search all the pages that contain the exact phrase "YouTube"?

chris_wot 12y ago

Is there a search engine that is as accurate as Google? Does Bing really stack up?

mikegioia 12y ago
I didn't think I ever would, but I've actually been using duck duck go as my primary search engine. However, about 10-20% of searches I need to prepend "!g" to search google instead since DDG isn't fully there yet.
apricot 12y ago
Bing has quietly improved a lot and is actually pretty good now, certainly better than its reputation lets on. It's the Zune of search engines.
marcosdumay 12y ago
As far as I know, no, there isn't. I've tried going away from Google, but always failed. The problem is that Google clearly care about search less and less each day. If the trend continues, we'll be able to change some day, but not because the other sites got better.
- Vik1ng 12y ago
  Tried it too. Wasn't that happy. I was also never a fan of different search options in my browser bar so the !bang feature wasn't really my thing either. Now I'm contributing to OpenStreetMap, because I think at least that stands a chance against google maps and might even help some other search engines. DuckDuckGo is using it and maybe Bing will at one point, at least that would explain why they provide aerial images.
hrktb 12y ago
For accuracy duckduckgo is leaps and bounds better than google search. But I think what most of the users want from a generic search engine is not accuracy but fuzziness, context and news awaresness. For instance if I search ping pong in google right now, my first result is a currently airing japanese tv series about ping pong (and the show name is not even in the same alphabet I used to search). Duckduckgo returns the english wikipedia article. Also, the title of this article is so messed up...

DanBC 12y ago

Matt Cutts gave some numbers about how often the + operator was used - and even then it was mostly used incorrectly. > > In the past, we provided users with the + operator to help you search for specific terms. However, we found that users typed the + operator in less than half a percent of all searches, and two thirds of the time, it was used incorrectly. http://insidesearch.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/search-using-your-terms-verbatim.html http://insidesearch.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/search-using-your... Check my math, but I think that means that + was used correctly in only 1 out of 600 searches. People mention "power users". Google does not want power users. Google wants a mass market of people who see, and click, ads. EDIT: i guess I need to say that I hated when Google changed the plus operator; and I find using Google now to be a frustrating and annoying experience. I'm shown results tha often are not relevant to my queries. And Barrkel makes a good point about my confusing potentially misleading description of the times + is used correctly.

barrkel 12y ago
When you say "+ was used correctly in only 1 out of 600 searches", it seems to imply that it was used incorrectly in 599 out of 600 searches. Your phrasing makes too strong a claim as most people understand the language, IMO. Let's not forget how large an audience any Google feature has, though. + being used correctly, even by 0.33% of users, is still probably a million people.
- e12e 12y ago
  So, 1 out of every 200 searches contain a "+", possibly for refinement. In 1 out of every three of those searches, the "+" helps the user find what's wanted. No information on a) some users are better at using the "+" correctly than others, b) If removing the "+" means that now three out of three of those searches fail.
  - DanBC 12y ago
    And no information if the correctly used pluses were inserted by humans, deliberately, and were useful. Still, I am surprised that Google has made search so poor for so many people in some situations. Although I understand they've done some work on making programming code easier to search for?

chewxy 12y ago

Did Google really name a feature after a P2P protocol? Coupled with the + symbol I initially thought this was about a file sharing protocol that G killed

annesa 12y ago

Interesting

_greim_ 12y ago

Ha, so this explains it. I hadn't been paying much attention, other than noticing that prepending "+" to google search terms (something I did infrequently to begin with) had started to just return zero results most of the time.

jacquesm 12y ago

"No results" is a feature, not a bug, I'd much rather have no results or very few than a whole pile of crap to wade through in case the real results are buried in there somewhere. Double quotes should translate to 'match this or nothing', what's the point of quoting otherwise. And if the + command is now no longer used then maybe bring back the old usage, which worked just fine. Change for the sake of change is ridiculous, changing a well known user-interface in order to push a non-core product is slightly mad. It also shows how bad it is to have all these services belong to one single company, imagine google+ being launched as facebook+, do you think that google would have dropped their '+' operator for that?

alok-g 12y ago

Response from 'thisisnotatest' from Google search team [1]: "I hear you. How to indicate to the user that we don't think there are any good matches for their query is something we debate and experiment with in search quality at Google." [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7725958 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7725958

joeevans 12y ago

Lol... I never knew the + stopped working... I've been using it all along. I guess I always assumed the search term I was prepending a + to was always in there, somewhere. No doubt I was getting less relevant results. Without a doubt, the '+' operator is the most important one, followed only by being able to search for a phrase surrounded by quotations.

xor-ed-wolf 12y ago
It's strange that you did not. WTF moment was the first thing I experienced when they did that and my search with + returned results that didn't contain the word. I was literally furious.

mixmastamyk 12y ago

I may be wrong, but I seem to remember using +word since the AltaVista days. I still do it, even though it doesn't work. (grumble) That and the results changing as I type drive me nuts. It is quite common for me to see something I want only to lose it on the next keystroke which was already queued.