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A comment on Experienced Programmers Use Google Frequently. Parent comment

Re:Experienced Programmers Use Google Frequently by DanielDent on Saturday April 30, 2016 @04:51PM (#11603518)
Thank you, that's a helpful tip! I used to use many modifiers for my Google queries, but Google dropped support for many of them, and doesn't seem to document comprehensively what they actually support from day to day.

I wish excluded keywords were the only frustration. Their index seems to have gotten considerably worse at dealing with any somewhat "long-tail" query. I'm not sure why.

I suspect they've won the spam battle by aggressively purging from their index, but in doing so they've lost the spam war because the false positive rate on their approach is way too high. Or maybe I'm completely off base.

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Re:Experienced Programmers Use Google Frequently by striking on Saturday April 30, 2016 @05:20PM (#11603652)
My favorite modifier removal: Currently, you can use - to exclude keywords. Once upon a time, you could use + to require a keyword... until Google+ came out, and + became how you would search for people's profiles.

sigh

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Re:Experienced Programmers Use Google Frequently by developer2 on Saturday April 30, 2016 @06:11PM (#11603837)
This. I can't believe someone approved removing the use of "+" as a search operator. It was at the very core of searching Google. It took months before I found out you needed to double-quote "every" "single" "damn" "individual" "word" to force searching by inclusion.
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Re:Experienced Programmers Use Google Frequently by nitrogen on Tuesday May 03, 2016 @01:59AM (#11618273)
I think the day Google nerfed search for the sake of Plus was the day they jumped the proverbial shark. At least for me, that was when I stopped thinking Google could do no wrong. Then they nixed Reader.
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Re:Experienced Programmers Use Google Frequently by GrumpyYoungMan on Saturday April 30, 2016 @11:15PM (#11604693)
Bing still honors the + operator, thankfully. I find it occasionally useful.
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