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Back in the day (late 90s) there was a company called Copernic that had a good search engine with a REALLY good desktop client. I remember being able to do all sort of filters, sorting and crazy searches. IIRC It was paid, and it was really way ahead of the simple search operations you can even currently do with Google (actually, Google has constantly removed search abilities as time goes by, like for example, anyone remember when Google Search could show tweeter search results? or that you could "block" domains from search results)


Honestly, there should be some sort of never-forget meme about Google removing the + operator when they started up their stupid social network that failed and then never put it back >:(

Just checked wikipedia, and it seems it'll be ten years ago this June that google stole + and forced quoting upon us for pure vanity reasons.


If someone is wondering (like I did) what the + operator was for:

foo +bar +baz

was equivalent to

foo "bar" "baz"


It stood for logical AND, so really your search term would be read as:

foo AND bar AND baz. It would be more accurate to type it as foo + bar + baz.


They've unfortunately conflated "must have" and "spelled exactly", which aren't the same thing.


This explains so much. I thought they were distinct operators. I thought quoting meant must match exactly, and the plus meant must be present. So +"baz" meant it must be exactly baz, and it must be present. +baz meant baz, or some variant like bazzes must be present.


On that last point, searches like `-site:example.com` looks like they still work.




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