With most other search engines, you really need to add a "+" in front of every word in order to ensure that it's actually in the result.
How funny that Google has come full circle and now requires that too. I'm sick of Google assuming I mean one thing when I mean another, but putting + in front of words ensures they are actually in the results.
Completely agree. I really wish there was a way to turn off the presumptions. Usually when I carefully craft a very specific query, I get back a bunch of generic results unless I put in those pluses.
Actually, now that I think about it, this might be something not particularly difficult to solve with greasemonkey...
Install by clicking the 'raw' link in the top right corner of the script.
Edit 2: Any thoughts on how to make the script run earlier, to avoid making two requests? It seems Greasemonkey doesn't actually support this, so it might have to be its own extension...
Yeah, the fact that it searches for terms you don't type in has really been annoying me for a while. You essentially have to put a + in front of every term in a technical search. I have to say, though, it makes sense for non-technical users, who are apt to type in misspelled and suboptimal terms. For the vast majority of users, Google probably knows better than they do what they should be searching for. Also, I think this change may have evolved as a more generic implementation of an attempt at stemming. For example, it makes sense for Google to additionally search for stereos when you enter stereo, and brings, bringing, and brought (and probably brang and brung) when you search for bring.
Another bugaboo of mine, though, is the fact that hyphenating words no longer acts the same as putting them in quotes. Searching for car-stereo used to be the equivalent of "car stereo" — one less character to type. Now Google ignores the hyphens.
This seriously happened?! That's messed up and I didn't even notice, except that my searches have not been as easy and crisp, but I've always blamed that on SEO.
Yeah. There are lots of good examples I come across all the time but because I can't remember them, try something silly like "web bosting". You'll notice words like "boosting" and "boating" are in bold in the 23 million results. With "web +bosting" you get just a few thousand results and "bosting" is in all of them.
(Yeah, this is a horrible example but I've had many instances of good ones, often relating to programming terms which then trigger off similarly spelled words..)
For what it's worth, I've contacted the appropriate people and the Bing speller team has reproed the issue and is investigating. Sorry you ran into it.
I find it annoying with plurals - my business is called Shirlaws, and 'Shirlaw' is a not-uncommon surname, meaning searches and especially Google Alerts are often filled with some guy coming third in a yacht race not information pertaining to my business.
That Google searches ignore punctuation also irritates me. My wife's name is Harmony - also a fairly common word - so searches for her throw up masses of "...live in harmony. Aldridge also thought ..." which are irrelevant.
"Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried" - Winston Churchill.
How funny that Google has come full circle and now requires that too. I'm sick of Google assuming I mean one thing when I mean another, but putting + in front of words ensures they are actually in the results.