

Ask HN: How do I force Google to search using plural - kooshball

I was looking for information on https libraries. On google https will return a bunch of results for http, which is totally useless to me. I tried both +https and &quot;https&quot; and neither seem to affect the results. Is there some other trick I&#x27;m missing?
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dekhn
\+ is no longer a Google Search operator. Quoting a word is.

What query did you do, specifically, and what kind of HTTPS libraries are you
looking for?

If I do [ https ] almost all links on the SERP contain the literal string
HTTPS.

If I do [ "https" ] every link on the SERP contains the literal string HTTPS.

In both cases, the results are nearly worthless. So, you must be trying
something like

[ "https" libraries ]

Again, that returns only moderately relevant results (all the matches contain
https literal text, but it's not a nice list of https libraries).

Being more specific is going to guide the engine to understand your intent
more clearly. For example [ "https" programming library for C++ ] finds a nice
list of HTTPS libraries, including this link about half-way down (personally,
I would prefer that was on top):

C/C++ libraries for HTTP programming - Stack Overflow
stackoverflow.com/questions/.../c-c-libraries-for-http-programming Sep 15,
2010 - C/C++ libraries for HTTP programming [duplicate] ... What well known
C/C++ libraries are out there that could allow one to implement servlets, or
at least provide most of the essentials for .... Self contained http/https
library ...

Note the search engine noticed the page has https text in it, even though the
title does not. The page points at libcurl, which seems like a good answer.

Another detail is that there are both server and client libraries for https,
you should probably specify which you want:

[ "https" client library for c++ ]

and in fact, that SERP is pretty great (first two links are both great
starting points).

~~~
wanda
This. Try being more specific, but not only with what you are looking for, but
also with what you are not looking for.

\- is still an operator and excludes words so you could say:

    
    
      -http -public
    

to exclude results about actual public libraries with books, and also to
exclude http.

Likewise you have

    
    
      intitle:
    
      filetype:
    
      ext:
    
      intext:
    
      allintitle:
    
      allintext:
    

etc.

