Why do search engines ignore the exclusion operator now “-”?

Question

Google, Bing, Duckduckgo, Yahoo, it seems like all of them have decided to stop honoring the "-". Surround things by quotes, add them multiple times, it doesn't seem to matter.Are there any decent search engines that do what you actually say left instead of extremely poorly trying to guess what you mean?

matt_heimer · Accepted Answer

Google still has it documented on https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433 and there is a none of these words option on https://www.google.com/advanced_searchMake sure you aren't putting the minus symbol in quotes. The quotes are what I see people get wrong. Many people still try to use the + symbol to indicate required but Google disabled that when working on Google+ and switched to quotes to indicate required words or phrases.

Ulus · Answer

I just did a google search for &ldquo;league of -legends&rdquo; (sans quotes) and it didn&rsquo;t return links to the game.

solus_factor · Answer

Quotes are also pretty much ignored now. I don't know why.

rozab · Answer

I use this feature all the time. Maybe you're getting A/B tested?

bjourne · Answer

Because negation is incredibly expensive in any information retrieval system. You want all recipes with blue cheese in them? That's easy. You want all recipes with no blue cheese in them? That's a massive number of recipes.

blackcats · Answer

Don&rsquo;t know, some spam sites show up in my google search like codegrepper. Sticking with queckqueckgo i guess

aww_dang · Answer

-"negative keyword"appears to work for me

decasteve · Answer

The cynical take:They'll do what's profitable over what's accurate.

Why do search engines ignore the exclusion operator now “-”?

I just did a google search for “league of -legends” (sans quotes) and it didn’t return links to the game.

Quotes are also pretty much ignored now. I don't know why.

I use this feature all the time. Maybe you're getting A/B tested?

Because negation is incredibly expensive in any information retrieval system. You want all recipes with blue cheese in them? That's easy. You want all recipes with no blue cheese in them? That's a massive number of recipes.

Don’t know, some spam sites show up in my google search like codegrepper. Sticking with queckqueckgo i guess

-"negative keyword"
appears to work for me

The cynical take:
They'll do what's profitable over what's accurate.