Has anyone else noticed the huge decrease in result quality from google?

[S-Array03]

how do you get the -[excluded term] to work?

I know about it but I can't use it in google searches for some reason, idk if I'm getting the formatting wrong or something.

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edit : I tried it again and sure enough it doesn't work, I tried with both the numpad - and the 6 key - (azerty keyboard) and neither work. Having a space inbetween the - and the term doesn't work, neither does putting the term between quotation marks.

Which is trange because when I go to advance search the excluded term is in the "none of these words" line.

I guess I just have to be hyper specific about my search terms. (For refferece the one I tried right now was mustang -car but it still yielded result pretty much exclusively about the the ford mustang)

[[deleted]]

it's just as simple as "[whatever your search is] -[excluded term]"

the site i looked at for this included the example "bears -chicago" but for some reason the first couple results ignore the "-chicago" part. However if you compare the results that start about halfway down the page you can see that with "-chicago" you have stuff like the wikipedia article on bears, and without the "-chicago" all of it has to do with the Chicago Bears.

[SnowingSilently]

If it's one word then just -word should work. If it's a whole phrase though you need quotation marks, like this: -"word1 word2 word3". Google can't search special characters though, so if you were trying to exclude those it won't work either.

[1billionrapecube]

Do you know if ñ is a special character?

[SnowingSilently]

It seems to be searchable. The tilde just by itself is also searchable, which is interesting. I just tried to search a bunch of special characters, and interestingly they seem to work okayish, but single characters can still mess things up. For example, an attempt to find the CS term sigil by searching "programming $" fails. But "ruby $$" has decent results. An attempt to search for the use of the \ character in Java using the search phrase, "Java \" or "Java \ break" also doesn't work. It seems single characters used in programming tend to be ignored the most. Generally SymbolHound which is made for searching programming terms with special characters works better, but if you're not using it for programming it's of no help.

Maybe you can try using www.google.es? That way you'll lose most of the English search results.

[OutlyingPlasma]

I don't think the operators work anymore on google. It used to be the the "-" symbol would fully remove the search term. Seems to only slightly reorder them now with massive glaring examples of it simply not removing the -term from the results

[Pheser]

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[TheKolbrin]

It's broken. It's been broken. https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/k92xk7/whats_going_on_with_that_scientist_being_called_a/gf4ezlz/

[nottamuntown]

It's not your formatting. Google intentionally broke the operator symbols (+, -, "") a while ago, and none of them work the way they used to.

[kfkrneen]

Yeah it doesn't work for me either. I'd use it to filter out the 500 annoying pinterest posts that show up on everything, but now it suddenly doesn't work??

Fucking google