Searching for manuals with Google

On 6/21/2009 11:04 PM Franc Zabkar spake thus:

My question is whether "+" actually does anything at all.

I seem to remember that it used to make a discernable difference, once upon a time, but lately haven't noticed any effect.

And since we're on the topic, how about some documentation (like by Google itself) on the use of its search engine? I've searched Google's help high and low and have yet to find a comprehensive reference to all available switches, syntax, etc. You'd think that would be easy to find. Does it even exist?

--
Found--the gene that causes belief in genetic determinism

On Mon, 22 Jun 2009 00:15:19 -0700, David Nebenzahl put finger to keyboard and composed:

I discovered the "filetype:pdf" and "site:.au" switches by using the Advanced Search and observing what terms were added to the search box.

Another annoyance which I'm having trouble understanding is why the number of hits often *increases* when I add an additional word to the search box.

Here is a simple example which gives 1 hit:

This ones gives 3 hits:

After writing the above, I think I may have found an answer:

=================================================================== Search exactly as is (+)

Google employs synonyms automatically, so that it finds pages that mention, for example, childcare for the query [ child care ] (with a space), or California history for the query [ ca history ]. But sometimes Google helps out a little too much and gives you a synonym when you don't really want it. By attaching a + immediately before a word (remember, don't add a space after the +), you are telling Google to match that word precisely as you typed it. Putting double quotes around a single word will do the same thing. ===================================================================

- Franc Zabkar

--
Please remove one \'i\' from my address when replying by email.

--
    W
  . | ,. w ,   "Some people are alive only because
   \\|/  \\|/     it is illegal to kill them."    Perna condita delenda est
---^----^---------------------------------------------------------------

There *was* a time that Google would accept a tilde (~) to indicate "close is good enough". As time has passed and dumber and dumber people use Google, "Assume they are all brain-dead" has become the default.

Yup. (It shows up as %2B in the URL.)

It does--but you're right; it has become deprecated. If you use the Boolean OR operator, that should also default to "Give me EXACTLY what I asked for".

Try including it *multiple* times.

+%2Bsearchterm+%2Bsearchterm

First, my own notes on posting Google URLs:

Google does a lousy job of determining what is English and what isn't, so &hl=3Den &rls=3Den are mostly noise in a URL.

btnG=3DSearch is complete noise.

%3A is a colon, so you can shorten filetype%3Apdf to filetype:pdf (which also makes things more readable).

Double quote marks get expanded to %22 so making sure that if there is a phrase in the seach string, pulling that LAST will save you one quote mark.

The www is also superflous.

Thus

ype%3Apdf&btnG=3DSearch can be shortened to

Some ham-fisted idiot at Google recently broke their highlighting of non-HTML pages (caches of txt, doc, PDF, XML, PHP) or I'd show you the highlighted version of that PDF.

Here's a short version (from Google):

*-*-*-particularly-effective+*-minus-sign+*-*-quotation-mark=s-*-*-*-*+ignores+Other-Advanced-*-*+add-a-plus-*-*-*-*+*-exact-phrase+*-*-=*-*-critical+*-*-*-*-*-more-than-one-meaning+*-*-*-either-*-*-*-* (I hope the lengthly URL yields useful highlighting.)