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Wednesday, October 07, 2026

search(+A +B) and search(+A -C)

Anymore it seems impossible to do a Web search that includes particular terms. A search like

+A +B

gives results where term B is not in the search results. Google does this, and now DuckDuckGo does it too, and as far as I can tell, so does Bing. And if you try to exclude term C

+A -C

the search results still include C, especially, I think, if it's commonly associated with A.

Does anyone have a solution for this? I think it's because the search engines don't want to return null results because they want to include their advertising links. 

It's frustrating. Or am I doing something wrong?

Edit 12-Oct: took out the quote marks that were around the search term, since they mean something on search that I didn't mean here.
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2 comments:

  1. Anonymous6:49 PM

    Try removing the inverted commas, " ", around both items in the search request. For example, +A -B
    Or, use the inverted commas around each term. For example, +"A" -"B"
    George

    ReplyDelete
  2. David Appell11:12 AM

    Thanks. But actually I only put the quote marks in for the sake of reading here. In the search bar I don't include them. I'll take them out in the post.

    ReplyDelete