
Google Really Advanced Search - tambourine_man
http://www.google.com/js/reallyadvanced.html
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petercooper
As funny as this is, it's sad that Google doesn't offer something that
actually searches for the stuff you enter and doesn't try to guess your
intentions or randomly jump to "Did you really mean [...], dumbass?". Kinda
like it did several years ago. Heavy use of + used to do that but the new ""
replacement is more of a crapshoot.

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sp332
There is a "verbatim" option, under the "more search tools" menu on the bottom
left of the search results.

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petercooper
Thanks. Right you are!

[http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...](http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&p=g_verb&answer=1734130)

Seems to be a few months old.

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anonymoushn
Sadly it's not real and you still can't get google to search for the query you
enter.

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sigmaxipi
All you need to do is put quotes around the phrase. Or if you want pages that
must contain all the words in any order, place quotes around each word. Or
just use Verbatim Search:
[http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...](http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&p=g_verb&answer=1734130)

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anonymoushn
I was pleased to learn Verbatim Search no longer requires you to spend several
clicks per query to use it, but sad that you cannot set it as a permanent
preference.

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johansch
A minimized form of a search query with verbatim enabled:

[http://www.google.com/search?tbs=li:1&q=britney+speers](http://www.google.com/search?tbs=li:1&q=britney+speers)

Edit the search engine definition string in your browser to something like
that...

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shasta
Why don't they start by allowing you to search for substrings in email?

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luxpsycho
What do you mean, send your query off by email? Or search actual mails? How
would they get them? Do you mean google mail?

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Devilboy
In Gmail you can search your own mail but whole words only. Searching for
PROPEL will not bring up an email containing the word PROPELLER for example.

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enf
The reason you can only search for whole words is that it's straightforward to
build an inverted index for whole words, but it takes dramatically more
storage to make an index to search for arbitrary substrings, since there are
exponentially many substrings of each string, most of which you would never
want to search for.

~~~
Devilboy
My old desktop-based email reader could do it though. I definitely feel like I
lost something here. Even just a KEYWORD* search would be an improvement, and
that does not require a bigger index.

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bdonlan
Most likely it was just doing an unindexed search over the whole thing. This
works, but requires a significant amount of resources - both CPU time and IOPS
- for people with large amounts of email. It's also slow unless you have only
a small amount of email or it's all in memory already. So it's not really
feasible for a free, shared service that offers multiple gigabytes of storage
space.

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dlss
This page had me really excited up until the "only show pages that will be
updated in the [next 24 hours, next week, next month]" option :(

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spicyj
I wish this was real.

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drivebyacct2
How much would you pay to run a custom query against all of Google's index?
Sounds interesting. Also, funny, Google spends a bit on creativity and get a
large return with publicity every April 1st.

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zackattack
I would love to see them compete with Amazon.

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possibilistic
Together with the 8 bit maps, I had quite a chuckle. I really love this page,
and I'm a little sad it doesn't function; I guess I won't be seeing any
websites with Polka midis.

Great April Fools, Google!

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kc0bfv
Did anyone catch the, "download our rank code so you can run Google at home",
link? I didn't realize this April Fools day until I saw that...

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brudgers
April fools day aside, this may show why Y-combinator is interested in finding
teams working on search startups. The joke is funny because this is what
people often want.

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AznHisoka
They wouldn't allow search this advanced because they fear SEO's would come up
with technique to abuse it to their advantage. Otherwise it'd probably been
out already.

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jonah
I love the recursive "Linked [from|to] pages that..." option.

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Geee
There's one april fools trick on Google Analytics too; you'll find a small
note icon which will play your analytics graph as notes for piano or sitar.

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trentfowler
If this is true I will be taking my news in tautology form from now on. THIS
JUST IN--SCIENTISTS EITHER DID OR DID NOT CONFIRM TODAY THAT PLUTO HAS
REGAINED PLANETARY STATUS! WE GO LIVE NOW TO THE MOON WITH MICHAEL JORDAN FOR
MORE ON THIS--WAIT--I'M GETTING UNCONFIRMED REPORTS THAT WE MAY ACTUALLY BE
TAKING YOU SOMEWHERE ELSE AT DIFFERENT TIME WITH ANOTHER HOST ABOUT AN
UNRELATED TOPIC--WAIT--WAIT--I CAN NOW CONFIRM THAT IT MIGHT ALSO BE ONE OF
LITERALLY INFINITE POSSIBILITIES, SO STAY TUNED!

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zyb09
Looks like every little 4 man team of engineers at Google is making their own
April Fools joke. I like it :)

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hobbyist
Is it really advanced or really primitive?

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iamgopal
true in subjective sense.

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trentfowler
Imagine the sensational headline potential for content that is true in the
tautological sense, e.g.

"BREAKING NEWS: SCIENTISTS EITHER DID OR DID NOT CONFIRM TODAY THAT PLUTO HAS
REGAINED PLANETARY STATUS!"

