
The + operator has been replaced. - hammock
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=1280&bih=869&q=hacker+%2Bnews&oq=hacker+%2Bnews&aq=f&aqi=&aql=1&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=924l3214l0l3294l15l10l1l1l0l1l167l921l1.6l8l0
======
ck2
So now you need to "quote" "every" "word" "you" "are" "searching" "for" - how
crazy is this?

What is even worse than this - and this is pretty bad already - is that terms
are no longer included by default.

Google will leave out terms you are searching for, if it so chooses, unless
you purposely put the plus (or now quotes).

The engineers are not in control, it's pretty darn obvious.

 _added: Doesn't the use of quotes prevent stemming? Didn't plus allow
stemming?_

~~~
jsolson
> The engineers are not in control, it's pretty darn obvious.

As a software engineer, I take offense at that. This is precisely the right
decision to make if you observe that this is how your customers are using your
product. You don't need a product guy to tell you that.

~~~
ck2
So what is the logical opposite of using a minus to remove terms? Quotes?

This is what customers remember and do? I highly doubt that.

Or are they trying to reserve the plus now for another feature in the future?

~~~
jaylevitt
Remember, on Google +, you don't mention @somebody, you mention +somebody. I'm
sure they're going to reuse + so you can search for +somebody.

~~~
ajays
This is stupid on Google's part. People are used to mentioning others via "@"
(unless, maybe, Twitter has copyrighted/patented this). Forcing people to use
"+" will just make adoption of G+ harder. Google should remember that they're
the underdog here, playing catchup to Twitter and FB. Raising the barrier to
entry only hurts them.

~~~
cubicle67
people have been using @ to mention others since pretty much the beginnings of
online discussion, _way_ before facebook and twitter (I'm agreeing with you -
this is a stupid move by Google and goes against 15+ years of convention)

~~~
MichaelApproved
Just because something has always been done one way doesnt mean it always has
to be done that way.

------
pornel
That's sad, as Google's "smart" broad interpretation of keywords makes it
worse and worse for very technical queries.

Quite often I have to prefix every term with +. Quote-based syntax doubles
annoyance of this pointless task.

~~~
joe_the_user
Indeed,

Also, I know from considerable experience that the plus operator had a
_distinct meaning_ from the quotes operator so this change definitely implies
that Google queries will be less fine-grained no matter what quotes means now.

Yes, Google is worse and worse for anything technical.

Alternatives anyone?

~~~
Sindisil
bing, perhaps?

I intend to give it a shot. Seems there's some reasonably powerful query
syntax: <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff795667.aspx>.

~~~
wanorris
My complaint about Bing for technical querying is that when I tell them I want
an exact phrase by wrapping it with quotes, it doesn't always believe me that
I really do want that phrase to appear in the result page.

Some of those other operators look promising, though. I'll have to try them
out.

------
przemoc
Seriously, I was wondering today whether I should ask HN what you think about
these google smart inflection and alleged misspelling detection.

I am so tired of this. I do mistakes (after all errare humanum est), but I do
it rarely, yet I am enforced to use quotes practically all the time (I am
doing it since many months at least, don't remember exact moment, but I think
in 2010 there wasn't automatic I-know-better, but only suggestions, correct me
if I'm wrong, please). It's such a PITA. Is there maybe some secret search
switch that can be used (and turned on in Chrome by default hopefully) to
allow me avoiding typing quotation marks (") more than many hundreds times a
day. And I still unconsciously always write without them for the first time,
and, surprisingly, sometimes get correct results when the terms are ultimately
known by everyone.

Before Google only suggested what I am possibly searching for. Why it is so
sure now (i.e. this year) to make my original queries second-class citizens?
Unbelievable and abominable poise.

~~~
mcclung
I just noticed today that my searches for "ipadm" return something relevant,
rather than assuming that I meant "ipad", and forcing me to confirm that I did
actually mean what I typed, which I think was the case just a couple of days
ago.

~~~
przemoc
I'm getting suggestions over my original queries definitely for some time
already, as I stated earlier. Maybe it's because I am constatly logged in, and
this new "great feature" was postponed for general use, i.e. all users. There
were cases of such incrementally introduced features before.

------
jneal
Okay, perhaps this is easily explained, but I am baffled.

When you search google for a small phrase, for example, oauth authorization:

search query: oauth authorization About 525,000 results

search query: oauth "authorization" About 1,470,000 results

How does the result not only increase, but increase nearly three-fold?

I've always thought the quotes were meant to be more exact. For example, if
you search for Web Design without the quotes, you will find results including
web design and website design, but if you search for "Web Design" with the
quotes, you will not find the entries that say "Website Design" so that
reflects less results than the latter. So why am I seeing this oddity, does it
make sense to anyone else?

~~~
ajays
The number of results reported is just a half-assed guess. The server which
got the search term calculates it by looking at what fraction of documents
matched, what is the total index size, etc.

Usually, the search phrase is hashed and the phrase sent to a backend server
based on the hash. So 'oauth authorization' and 'oauth "authorization"' hash
differently and get sent to different backend servers. These two calculate the
'number of results' figure differently, and hence you get the difference.

That is my guess at how you're seeing these numbers; I don't work for Google
(but have some knowledge of another search engine).

------
nickmolnar2
I'm guessing w/in a few months Google launches a G+ integration with search
that lets you reference your contacts in search queries using the + operator.

~~~
tristanperry
Personally I'm waiting for the "Sorry, you cannot currently search with us as
you aren't logged into Google+" message.

(Am obviously joking, but I agree with your sentiment that G+ integration does
seem to be... going quickly; I can understand why from a business POV though)

~~~
jeffool
Quickly, yes. But I can't see why they took out this functionality before they
were launching the new functionality.

It seems that this is just inviting ill will for no reason. At least if they
did both at the same time, they would be able to say "But we did this other
new thing instead! Isn't it neat?!"

------
petedoyle
Is there an operator for "must occur"? Embarrassingly, I've always thought +
was used for that (and quotes for exact phrases).

It seems like recently Google has started to return more results which don't
include some of my search terms. It gets really frustrating when trying to
track down error messages.

~~~
starwed
The plus sign definitely _was_ used for that.

------
bonaldi
Doing this correctly was Google's USP. Right in the early days, when Altavista
had default-OR searching, searchers did "x AND y" almost as a tic. When you
did that in Google, it boasted "Google searches for all terms by default. No
need for And!"

People switched on the strength of that alone. Now they've gone to this deeply
frustrating method of ignoring hard-to-find words in queries, and compounded
it by making your actual search even harder to carry out. For marketing
reasons. Brilliant.

------
Florin_Andrei
It's funny because in natural language, double quotation marks mean anything
but the exact, literal sense of the word. Sometimes they are used to convey
the exact opposite of the word between quotes: Yes, Robert Ford, you were so
"brave" when you shot Jesse James.

~~~
Raphael
Sarcasm is a new use. The original use is tied to the name, quoting what was
said or written before.

~~~
przemoc
Informative comment, i.e. not really a response. For those who don't know
correct term yet (I didn't up to 2 years ago).

Florin_Andrei refers to so called _scare quotes_. Wikipedia explains them as
follows:

" _Scare quotes_ are quotation marks placed around a word or phrase to
indicate that it does not signify its literal or conventional meaning."

Raphael is obviously right here (but mind that sarcasm is only one of scare
quotes examples). Let me quote (w/o scare) Wikipedia again:

"Use of the term "scare quotes" appears to have arisen at some point during
the first half of the 20th century. Occurrence of the term in academic
literature appears as early as the 1950s."

It's only about academic existence, but even considering real existence, it
won't be much earlier.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes>

------
electrichead
I stumbled on this earlier. I happen to use this operator a lot, so I will
definitely miss it. I wonder why it was removed. For example, when you
absolutely want to filter out a certain programming language from the others
when they all use the same keyword, what would you use instead? Their
recommendation to use quotes is not applicable in that scenario. Disappointing
move overall.

~~~
wx77
It seems - hasn't been removed [https://www.google.com/#sclient=psy-
ab&hl=en&source=...](https://www.google.com/#sclient=psy-
ab&hl=en&source=hp&q=truecrypt+-open&pbx=1&oq=truecrypt+-open&aq=f&aqi=&aql=1&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=30921l34303l0l34599l15l13l0l2l2l1l353l2148l3.7.2.1l15l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&fp=889de57c67d2dc7d&biw=1366&bih=631)

~~~
morsch
Well, they haven't released their information deletion app, Google-, yet.

------
rickmb
For a long time I've been getting increasingly annoyed with Google's
"intelligence" not respecting my searches and modifying them into what they
think I'm looking for. So far I've been too lazy to switch, but this does it.

For the first time since switching from Alta Vista to Google, I'm going to
change search engines. Google has jumped the shark for me.

------
pnathan
This really leads me to believe that the market is ripe for a "technical"
search engine, which can do sophisticated queries of semi-structured data.

I could see such an engine having both a human readable output and a json
output, suitable for chaining into some other analysis pipeline.

~~~
gtani
Not sure exactly what you're describing, but my project, for an extremely
small number of programming languages (4 or 5): hand compiled datasets, such
as clojure atlas,

<http://www.clojureatlas.com/>

and mine:

<https://github.com/gtani7/Prog_Lang_Search_engine>

~~~
pnathan
I'm more thinking like a search engine against the web, but designed around
being able to query in sophisticated ways: e.g., regexs, views against the
outputs, being able to collect data into forms that a programming language can
reason & requery against. WebQL is a commercial product that is like what I'm
describing.

~~~
zealog
While it can't do all of that, you Blekko let's you use slash tags like
/programming or /ruby to limit your results to specific, relevant sites.
Definitely my go-to for tech queries.

------
tripzilch
But the quotes don't really work any more, since ages. Not right, anyway. See
I search for `"death coffee"` and I get this:

1st hit: Coffee Drinkers Have Slightly Lower Death Rates, Study Finds

2nd hit: Stieg Larsson's Death: Coffee Or Conspiracy?

The first one doesn't even have the phrase "death coffee" in the page! And in
the second one it's split up with a colon in between (technically correct, but
not a single phrase).

And only after that, come the expected results, where "death" is a modifier of
"coffee" (coffee was so strong we called it "death coffee"), which is what
you'd expect when you put a phrase in quotes, no?

Results I'm sure the old Google of a few years back would have presented me as
first hits, too.

~~~
tripzilch
Addition, reading a bit further down this discussion, someone mentioned the
`allintext:` operator. This works, it actually returns only pages with the
phrase "death coffee":

<https://www.google.com/search?q=allintext:%22death+coffee%22>

Ok Stieg Larsson is still the first hit, but as I said, it's technically
correct. And now so are the rest of the results :D

BTW, to whoever made that Finderr.com page: It doesn't work quite correctly,
if you search for `"death coffee"` it doubles the quotes. You probably need to
re-think your query regex. Maybe you could modify it so that it includes the
`allintext:` operator when you search for an exact phrase?

~~~
vaneck
Thanks for the feedback! I fixed the handling of quotes. I'm not currently
adding 'allintext:' to the search but I do add &nfpr=1 to the query string,
which as far as I can tell from testing should be equivalent or actually cover
more cases.

------
thenduks
Another shortcut to whole-phrase is using `.`

    
    
        hacker.news == "hacker news"

~~~
gmartres
hacker-news should work too.

~~~
mkl
That stopped working a couple of years ago. I used to use it all the time.

------
pasbesoin
Warning sign: When you start fucking with your core product.

Qualification: Ultimately, your customers define what "fucking" means with
respect to your product.

------
tristanperry
Ugh, not a fan of this move at all. Just seems clunky and poor usability. I
actually know a decent number of non-techies who know about and use the +
operator. Seems bizarre to abolish it entirely.

Especially since if you do a search with "+", Google points out that's it's
abolished but doesn't change your query for you (i.e. surely it'd also be good
for usability to change [hacker +news] into [hacker "news"]?)

------
lukeschlather
Okay, this behavior is getting really odd. I was just wondering if there was a
way to tell git to diff the current state with the n-1th commit (git diff
--nth-commit 2 or something) and so I searched for

<http://www.google.com/search?q=git+diff+most+recent+commits>

In the first link __more __is inexplicably bolded. Okay, maybe people
sometimes confuse more and most, I'll try double quotes:

<http://www.google.com/search?q=git+diff+most+recent+commits>

Basically the same result. Let's try plus:

[http://www.google.com/search?q=git+diff+%2B%22most+recent%22...](http://www.google.com/search?q=git+diff+%2B%22most+recent%22+commits)

Well that seems to work. I guess I'm not part of the A/B test. Any input? I
think everyone needs non-fuzzy matching out of their search from time to time.

~~~
TillE
> In the first link more is inexplicably bolded.

I hate this Google feature. It's getting worse and worse, making my searches
increasingly fuzzy. And yes, that's occasionally helpful when I'm not sure
what terms to use. But the vast majority of the time, what I type in the box
is exactly what I want to find.

------
Deutscher
While we're on the subject, does anyone know how to search with date/period
restrictions _without_ using 'Advanced Search'? "foo date:3" (last three
months) doesn't work anymore.

~~~
swirlee
You can click on "More search tools" on the left sidebar and below "Any time"
choose "Past month," "Past year," etc., or "Custom range..." As a Rails
developer I use "Past year" _constantly_ because articles and docs from two
years ago are utterly outdated.

------
TobbenTM
But I have always used double quotation marks, am I the only one?

~~~
joe_the_user
I have used +"a phrase" and gotten a different result from just "a phrase"
combined with other words on a number of occasions. It was part of my search
strategy for complex information.

This just dumbmifies Google search a little more...

~~~
mtkd
It's like a bad dream, I used it daily to filter results. Why would they
obsolete that?

~~~
oinksoft
Because they want to give competitors an opening~

------
Raphael
This is ironic for me personally. 8 years ago a troll in the school library
insisted that putting quotes aaround my one word search term would improve the
results, and I laughed him away. Now his mad idea has been adopted officially.

~~~
przemoc
He may just predicted: quotes will always guarantee intact query (hopefully it
won't be broken ever), so they're ultimately giving you better results.

If you think from the current perspective many changes and constants we've
seen or we're seeing now in the world (not only IT-related) were predictable,
yet not everyone had courage to express them to others. You have to be careful
when laughing at others views and ideas.

~~~
throwaway64
That behavior is broken on a number of searches, seemly at random, I've done
tons of queries where words inside "" will be ignored or helpfully auto
corrected with no indication its doing so.

------
hamutalm
probably due to Google+ ...

------
tambourine_man
I'm sure it's been considered before, but what would the cost of an open
source search engine be?

I mean, Wikipedia manages to run itself on donations only.

How hard would it be for, say Mozilla to launch a search service?

------
taylorbuley
Not seeing this across the board. But can this possibly be because they want
"Google+" to be its own term and not "Google AND" shorthand?

~~~
rhizome
I can imagine they don't want people continuing to say that "the google plus
doesn't work anymore."

------
kevinh
It's pretty odd that they don't tell what the + operator now means, or more
likely, what it _will_ mean in the future. If you're going to take away a
feature that I use, I'd be a lot more accepting if you explained _why_.

~~~
stouset
My money's on something related to Google+.

------
uniclaude
This is terrible news to me. Like a lot of people here, I believe the reason
is that they will roll up some social feature that may involve using the plus
sign the same way it is used on Google+, but still, it makes things less
convenient to me.

I just wrote that thing[1] that I'm running on my localhost, so I can search
google the "old" way. I made it as my default search engine in Chrome, so it's
transparent. This will not suit everyone's needs, but I'd rather share it
anyway.

[1]: <https://gist.github.com/1305438>

------
redler
Unless I'm misremembering, at some point in the distant past one could use the
dot operator between search terms to mean the equivalent of a quoted phrase.
So

    
    
      this.phrase
    

was the equivalent of

    
    
      "this phrase"
    

I think it worked with the plus operator as well, so searches like

    
    
      +this.phrase
    

provided a nice fluent shorthand. I guess the plus is now headed for status as
a reserved symbol for the obvious reason.

~~~
vizsladriver
Yes, I really miss being able to search for new.york or los.angeles, for
example. Those terms used to be equivalent to "new york" or "los angeles", but
now they are equivalent to the phrases without quotes. I.e. the words no
longer have to be next to each other.

Also, requiring the quotes is really painful on a mobile browser keyboard.

------
mynameishere
As soon as the query hits a server, they probably replace the quotes with a
plus sign so they didn't have to change anything in the infrastructure.

------
nistrum
What's the bet that this is a self-interested modification, so people can
search for Google+ or any other plus-related products they might invent?

------
loceng
+GooglePlus stole it

------
inopinatus
Dear Google

If you want me to quote a string, make it easy. Allow me to highlight the
string and quote it with a single keystroke ", textmate-style.

yours faithfully etc

------
johnx123-up
Someone mentioned that Google has recruited some Yahoo! guys who screwed that
up. (I think it's relevant to mention here)

------
guelo
This is really a fuck you to people that used this operator, they could have
chosen another single character but they really wanted to piss us off by
making us surround the term thus making it a little bit more annoying to type,
that is mean. Everytime I have to do this it will make me hate Google a little
bit.

------
zecg
-term still works. I guess Google+ needs the plus sign for something, so now "quoted" "terms" will include both quoted and terms, but not only as "quoted terms" but also "terms quoted". It's a bit of bother to use quotes when explicitly demanding a term, but no loss of functionality, as it seems.

------
47
It might be like when Google sent a plea to the public requesting not to use
Google as a verb fearing the genericizing and potential loss of its trademark.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_(verb)>

------
Nicknameless
One positive change I noticed is when I'm searching for something related to
C#, Google now retains the # symbol in the search suggestions rather than
changing my search to C. For me that almost makes up for the missing + change.

------
yaix
Probably pretty soon you will be able to search +John Doe googleplus profiles.

------
antirez
there is also an ethical aspect here. With "smart" handling of query, that is,
not all the terms you digit are required to be on that page, it is simpler for
Google (or any other search engine) to unilaterally select where to veicolate
your search.

I hope that Google is not doing anything evil here, but the fact that all the
words you searched _must_ be in the resulting pages is a very good contract
with the user from the point of view of transparency. But for default it is
not in this way since long time.

Forcing "you" "to" "type" like that makes it even worse.

~~~
przemoc
Well, Google is known to be doing many evil things, like providing different
results in different countries for same queries in same languages (and no,
it's beyond personalization). They obviously have some agreements with govts
and such to filter some content etc., so I wouldn't be surprised if there was
much more to it.

Despite all these left-handed actions, Google is still the best search engine
and it rather won't change in upcoming future. The thing is while I criticize
Google, I still use their search engine daily, gmail, reader, etc., because
after all they have really useful products.

------
nowthis1
Google is getting worst everyday... Google have already started to return
whatever results they think is right even if it doesn't contain _any_ of your
keywords and now this?

------
kurrent
I read this title in hoping it was a change in javascript

------
liljimmytables
I think it's because people were trying to find their new social network and
were getting errors instead. </conspiracytheory>

------
mc32
I wish they had replaced the - operator since many error codes contain a minus
and it's easier to type -2081 than "-2081".

~~~
Raphael
Why would an error code be negative?

~~~
przemoc
It's a matter of conventions. Look at Linux kernel for instance. Error codes
are positive, but if function is returning error, then return code is -error,
i.e. negative and it's pretty sensible solution. Mind that in case of
syscalls, errno stuff comes from glibc, which wraps syscalls to set errno and
return -1. So searching for -error is not something awkward, but, as stated
earlier, you have to quote it in google to make it work.

------
itsnotvalid
So where is the cheat sheet for google search?

I am totally lost now.

------
klklklk
Wasn't this an old altavista syntax ?

------
guyht
DuckDuckGo anyone?

------
kefs
fwiw, minus still works to remove results...

------
beefman
Boo!

------
recoiledsnake
This is getting out of hand and quite annoying, especially for technical
queries. Maybe Google can indulge us geeks with options or on a different
Google site? Surely the tech folks at Google can't be happy with this? Maybe
they have a more powerful internal search for themselves.Cmon, share!

Not counting on it though, after seeing what happened to code.google.com. If
Bing or anyone else having decent web converage implements a proper search,
I'll be all over it.

~~~
Sindisil
I'm not sure of your definition of "proper search", but bing seems to have a
reasonably flexible search syntax (<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/ff795667.aspx>).

I'm personally going to give it and DDG a try over the next couple weeks, just
in case either is currently significantly better for tech related searches.

So far Duck Duck Go is looking like a potential win.

------
ThaddeusQuay2
"Today, Google announced The Google Keyboard for use with all Google products.
With a nostalgic nod to the early days of APL, it contains special keys, thus
eliminating the kind of operator overloading that you get with ordinary
keyboards. The + key is huge, and takes up the entire space where the numeric
keypad would have been. The Google Keyboard is round and bright yellow, making
it hard to lose but stylish and ready for easy carry. It comes in two
versions. The ad-free one is leased to you at $1,000 per year. The other one,
which has a monochrome display strip running across the top, replacing the
function keys, is free, but shows a constant stream of text ads in the fashion
of a stock market ticker." - Wired, 10/22/2012.

------
glanch
After reading this thread, I think it's safe to say that nobody knows how to
search anymore.

------
thucydides
Hmm... this actually makes sense.

~~~
ctdonath
What does? I'm not sure what's going on, since the meaning of the operators
keeps shifting.

So what DOES + mean now? double-quotes? quotes around individual words vs.
phrases?

How do I now say I want to find an exact phrase, nothing between the words, no
variations in spelling?

~~~
uxp
Not the most intuitive, but a period between each query word will return
results as exact match, unless it actually cant find the phrase and then it
will split them up.

[https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=the.quick.brown.fox.ju...](https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=the.quick.brown.fox.jumps.over)

------
adhipg
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
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
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
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.

