This would be my main complaint about DDG: when there are no results for quoted search terms (but not when it's a single quoted term) it will just ignore the quotes and give results which most of the time are completely not what I need without even saying it is doing that, yet often it takes me a while to realize I made a typo and it's now giving me things I cannot use. IIRC it was not always like that though.

We will respect your search query at Runnaroo if you use quotes. Google also has a verbatim search filter, which does a decent job most of the time.

Thanks, I will check it out. Good luck with the project!

This looks really cool! I've on a search project as well, that looks like it has the same goal, and uses a similar approach and philosophy.

... until you want to search for something verbatim with quotes in it. Google doesn't seem to respect escaped quotes like "hello \"this\" is a test" which is quite surprising to me considering how they invent programming languages and all.

I imagine this is because the punctuation isn’t in their index at all, so it makes no difference how you format the query.

Is there an whole-Web search engine that isn’t a fulltext search engine, but rather works more like grepping a virtual text file that contains the entire Internet, such that one could match on punctuation and so forth?

I don't know ... would you be willing to insert a $1000 bill every time you wanted to make a full pass over such a corpus?

They could execute the query on the index and then filter before serving.

I'm sure a thousand engineers at Google can figure this out.

You think it's practical to run the query on the index, materialize the full result, re-index it, run the full query string, and rank? This suggests you do not understand the scale of the problem.

You don't need to re-match or re-index on the full set of results to display just the first page.

I fully understand the scale of the problem. I also think this is a very approachable problem for a thousand Google engineers who have done a lot harder things.

So much this... I commented earlier how I miss altvavista search language. Stuff like the 'near' operator was awesome. Want all john doe's papers ? "john" near "doe" got you "John Doe", "Doe, John", "John A. Doe", etc

Yes, playing with the near operator was a way to do a manual page rank before Google existed.

oh god yes, that would be nice. I know what i typed stupid search engine, if i put it in quotes...i only want that exact phrase. Don't just cast that aside and search for the words individually.

Yeah, I wish that there was an option in Google (or anything else) to rank my results based on a criteria other than "many people near you have searched for the same thing". Sure, this is helpful for current events but for other things I've been finding that my results are garbage blogs written by an AI and I'm needing to append "reddit" to the end of my query to get a real answer

I think I’m appending “Reddit” to about 70% of my searches these days.

I've largely switched to duckduckgo, which does honor quotes in that way.

Hmm, read this after I posted my other comment :) So, is that a setting? Does a search for "nonexistin gcrap" return no results for you then? It does for me..

I played with it a bit; it may be limited to one word. So "nonexstin" does come back with sites with that literal word in it. But with 2 words, it does the "what I think you mean" thing. TBH, I have only tried it with one word at a time for my use of "the site must have at least this exact word" type use cases.