Re: More effective searching
Jan Claeys <lists@janc.be> writes:
> On Tue, 2025-06-24 at 07:27 -0500, Richard Owlett wrote:
>> Side Issue -- Google and DuckDuckGo seem more interested in quantity
>> rather than quality. Any pointers to search engine with friendly
>> Boolean search? TIA
>
> "You" "can" "try" "putting" "double" "quotes" "around" "every" "word"
> AND "word group" OR -use -dashes -to -exclude
>
> https://www.lifehack.org/articles/technology/20-tips-use-google-search-efficiently.html
> https://www.lifewire.com/bing-advanced-search-3482817
>
> ... might also be useful (DDG is based on Bing)
In the past with DDG '-' excluded and '+' included, but now that is no
the case. Rather, to quote from
https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/syntax
the meaning is the following:
cats -dogs Fewer dogs in results
cats +dogs More dogs in results
Just after this change was made several years ago, I found that in some
cases, adding
'-foo'
actually lead to more results containing 'foo' than when 'foo' was
omitted completely, presumably because less 'foo' is potentially still
more than no 'foo'. I did complain to DDG at the time and I have the
impression that the issues has now been fixed.
Cheers,
Loris
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