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