From the linked article:

> “search term”

> Force an exact-match search. Use this to refine results for ambiguous searches, or to exclude synonyms when searching for single words.

Author claimed they tested all of the operators, but this one in particular I can confirm haven't worked reliably for me for over a decade and across a number of machines and accounts.

Some times it can be traced down to things like me searching for "foo bar" and Google thinking

> He said foo. Bar immediately replied [...]

is a valid match which is kind of understandable.

But most of the time I can't really see why the page shows up at all. No trace when searching in the page nor in the page source.

Try opening the “Search tools” menu in the results page and selecting “Verbatim”... I think that makes “literal” searches work, because otherwise Google uses synonyms and language analysis to attempt to match your search to results.

The query parameter google adds for verbatim matches is tbs=li, so you can append that to the url, like

  https://www.google.com/search?q="somestring"&tbs=li

Some other uses of "tbs": https://stenevang.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/google-advanced-p...

That too has consistently failed between 2007 and late 2020.

Now it just fails inconsistently (i.e. it sometimes works).

Google the company, runs on an algorithm of arbitrary complexity.

I've found the "around" proximity search to be one of the most useful, if not THE most useful operators. It's SUPER useful if you're looking for something you just know someone must've already posted somewhere but you just can't find it!

It always reminds me of learning how to search databases back in the 90s when you had to pay by the minute and you really needed to know all the operators and how to use them! Old school librarian skills :-)

AltaVista had this 25 years ago as the "near" operator. Early Google was relatively gimped in comparison with it's limited search syntax in comparison to the main incumbents.

The inurl: keyword is extremely useful when combined with the site: keyword, e.g.,

https://www.google.com/search?q=site:reddit.com+inurl:progra...

This would pull up results for "Vim tutorial" from the /r/programming subreddit. Of course, there are better ways to search by subreddit, but using site: and inurl: is the most website-agnostic way to narrow down results. Both these keywords also work on DuckDuckGo.

I also often use the "I'm Feeling Lucky" keyword "\" on DuckDuckGo, e.g., to search for lyrics

https://www.duckduckgo.com/?q=\rebecca+black+friday+lyrics

You can just do site:reddit.com/r/programming :)

Of course, for Reddit that's definitely better. But there are cases where the inurl + site solution is the only possible one -- I'm a physicist and I often want to find papers from a specific journal, e.g., the Physical Review Letters. Now, I could use the search function on the journal's page, but in my experience that doesn't often give you good results. So I search PRL using the site:link.aps.org+inurl:PhysRevLett keyword, e.g.,

https://www.google.com/search?q=site:link.aps.org+inurl:Phys...

I saw this a few days ago on the front page of HN. Thought it was pretty good. https://www.gwern.net/Search

Wow had no idea most of these operators existed. Thanks for sharing (and to the original post too, I didn't know a couple of those e.g. before:)

Same here, thought I was a master of Googling already, but good to learn something new.

Sadly, every time I try to get technical with these when I'm trying to Google with precision, after two or three searches I start getting blocked by really hard Captchas, and messages saying I might be either a bot or a hacker. It's really annoying.

Obviously a human user would never use such cryptic and complex search terms. /s

The first two results for "bootstrap AROUND(6) cpu" are about bootstrap though.

"bootstrap cpu" gives far higher quality results.

Yes, it's a difficult term. Even "bootstrap compiler" returns JS library results. I'm not claiming my example was the best one for demonstrating AROUND(N).

You can always try excluding JS-related hits: `bootstrap AROUND(6) cpu -js -javascript`

This used to be in Altavista but I think it was NEAR. It was even more useful then when the default algorithms weren't great.

I didn't know about AROUND(N), thanks.