Why doesn't google.com have a comprehensive list of these? I'm constantly seeing new ones that I didn't know about, but google never teaches you about them so you have to find them in obscure blog posts
The range operator also works great with years, dates, though the Tools menu with shortcuts for before: and after: operators can help there too.
One I haven't seen mentioned yet but used to be documented is that you can leave out words in a phrase by replacing them with an asterisk. I'm having trouble not italicizing text in this comment box, so pretend \* means a single asterisk: "Stocks rose today by \* percent" as a search matches the phrase "stocks rose today, led by a 4.4 percent". (Which until this post, had only one result on Google.)
Note that it's not 100% exact matching, because for actually exact matches you have to select "Verbatim" under Tools > All Results in the menu below the search box on the results page.
The only downside to using all these operators is that you'll get very familiar and frustrated with the Google reCAPTCHA prompts as your search is "too precise to be human". Even when signed in to Google, especially often in Safari on an iPhone. Sigh.
You can use three asterisks in a row, surrounded by whitespace, to get a single asterisk like: "Stocks rose today by * percent".
Oddly, this results in a non-italicized asterisk in the output, contrary to reports in earlier comments that the resulting asterisk would be in italics. There is, however, a zero-length italicized string right before the asterisk in the HTML:
> Oddly, this results in a non-italicized asterisk in the output, contrary to reports in earlier comments that the resulting asterisk would be in italics. There is, however, a zero-length italicized string right before the asterisk in the HTML:
It mostly happens using "site:" queries which I use frequently to limit things to local websites (by domain) or for searching sites that have poor search engines (Amazon, for example). It rarely happens the first query, but often by the third or fourth modification or by the third or fourth page of results you visit, it will show a reCAPTCHA if it doesn't have enough "randomness" or doesn't think you're actually browsing Google and third-party sites the way others commonly do. (Robots are more likely to use search operators, for example, and more likely to pretend to be iPhones so they don't have to move the mouse, etc.)
My earlier query triggered it. Without a query, I can make the following text show up by going to https://www.google.com/sorry/index which when a relevant query is attached to the URL, it shows a reCAPTCHA for the search query, and also shows your IP address, etc.
> About this page
> Our systems have detected unusual traffic from your computer network. This page checks to see if it's really you sending the requests, and not a robot. Why did this happen?
If you click the link "Why did this happen?" it says:
> This page appears when Google automatically detects requests coming from your computer network which appear to be in violation of the Terms of Service[1]. The block will expire shortly after those requests stop. In the meantime, solving the above CAPTCHA will let you continue to use our services.
> This traffic may have been sent by malicious software, a browser plug-in, or a script that sends automated requests. If you share your network connection, ask your administrator for help — a different computer using the same IP address may be responsible. Learn more[2]
> Sometimes you may be asked to solve the CAPTCHA if you are using advanced terms that robots are known to use, or sending requests very quickly.
The annoying part is that my account has never been whitelisted based on good behaviour. Instead, I end up seeing such reCAPTCHAs thousands of times a year, to the point where I stop counting them. Roughly half the time I'll answer the reCAPTCHA and the other half of the time, I'll close the tab and go do something else. Cloudflare site loading captchas are even worse, though. They delay the site by 5 seconds while they "check my browser", and then show an hCAPTCHA to solve, even when I'm already signed in with the first-party site. Very annoying, though the captcha is often easier to solve than Google's. The Cloudflare block often on streaming media websites. Ironically, Cloudflare's captchas have never prevented me from using commonly available Python scripts to watch streaming flash videos in VLC, they only block my web browsing...
I can only assume that Safari's excellent ad blocking and tracking prevention is causing my browsing traffic to stand out compared to others', enough that it prompts these CAPTCHAs more frequently.
You could try your site:amazon.ca specific queries on DDG. DDG will allow you to iterate your queries without triggering a reCAPTHA. When you believe you have the best results you can get on DDG, then try that same query on Google. This way you avoid doing the iteration on Google and triggering the reCAPTCHA. Instead you just do one search on Google. Google will usually give some additional results that were not shown in DDG.
That's a good idea, yes, I'll have to try DDG if I hit a reCAPTCHA: Most of my searches don't start with me using advanced operators (except if I'm buying products in Canada because I'll generally use "site:ca" term then), I generally add the advanced operators when a basic search isn't working. And the reCAPTCHA doesn't kick in right away, so I'm not always reminded of the issue. But if I get hit by a reCAPTCHA, I might try DDG now instead. Thanks for the tip!
I would be interested to see an example of it ignoring quotes silently because I've heard a lot about it. I use search terms in quotes relatively often and have never noticed that, although it does the 'did you mean without quotes' thing all the time.
In the past for very long tail content, I've found Bing and Yandex to be useful. Yandex image search in particular is often better than Google or Bing, particularly if you are searching for people because it does some facial recognition.
Doing some "related:" queries returns some interesting results that look human-curated and out-of-date. related:google.com shows results for Yahoo, Bing, AOL Search, and HotBot (which used to be a search engine, but the brand is now for a VPN provider).
Having a reliable search syntax would commoditise Google as other search engines could offer the same options. Having just a search box, instead of lots of options was how they moved ahead of e.g altavista in the first place.
Google would rather people are trained to just type human speak into the search box.
> would commoditise Google as other search engines could offer the same options
i highly doubt that's a concern. Google's competitive advantage will not be eroded if they did have operators clearly documented. Another search engine could not replicate google's index, even if they could replicate the operators.
And most people do want to just type human speak and have the machine magically interpret it correctly.
> Why doesn't google.com have a comprehensive list of these?
It is quite obvious that google does not give a s&it whether I find what I think I want to find. Google is much more interested in 1) serving me ads they think are most profitable and 2) giving me results they think I want.
I'm pretty sure your (1) is correct. I think your (2) should be giving you results they think you should want, as in you shouldn't want to search for a conspiracy theory (even if your goal is to see what the other side is thinking).
Actually, Google eventually wants users to find everything with predictive AI giving it to them before they search. That's not really a secret, they've announced more than once in the past that that is what they are increasingly working toward.
One reason they might not have a comprehensive list is because some might be relatively expensive to execute, but they can't/won't disable them for legacy reasons.
> One reason they might not have a comprehensive list is because some might be relatively expensive to execute, but they can't/won't disable them for legacy reasons.
Ah, Google, always so reluctant to get rid of anything legacy because of their fanatical devotion to their existing user base.
At least now we are somewhat more empowered to find obscure blog posts. Which raises the suggestion that hackers are advantaged towards finding information. Which raises the suggestion that we should take the independent initiative of using SEO to inform more people about how to become search super-users.
