Edit: i'll update this list of search engines that are alleged (up to you, the Reader, to verify) not to respect special search operators:

• owoarchist said Google

Keep your previous search terms but add "NOT" then whatever the word thats coming up that you want to exclude from search results since its not relevant to what you're looking for

I just intuited and put this to use a moment ago and it works and helped filter down things substantially

On most search engines you can use the syntax -Cuck to exclude Cuck porn and you can put "Team sports" in quotation marks like so to ensure only pages with that phrase will be shown

Nice

is the opposite for + like +includeTerm such that includeTerm must be included?

Which search engine?

I feel like they're sort of universal to the point if you have to ask that question then what you're using now (if you're asking from $
having experience of it not working) isnt worth it and to try a different search engine.

I dont want to say what I use, vut I hope I'm making sense. Just try whatever you are cool using but try examples like with "keyword" or -dontIncludeTerm or +includeTerm

All of them.

e: perhaps I sounded flippant. I didn’t mean to, so let me apologise and clarify: this has been a thing for a long time, and every search engine implemented this a long time ago. It’s pretty standard. There are some regex style things you can do in pretty much all of them, too, partly because it’s sort of free in the codebases they all use deep down. I don’t want to be too technical, but the ‘x NOT y’ thing is so basic, all search engines of any size (even homegrown ones on one-off websites that aren’t using SDKs for whatever reason) implement this basically on day 1. I’ve implemented this myself in homespun proprietary search engines within homespun proprietary software decades ago.

There are a bunch more ‘commands’ like this, many of which are universal.

Man, I've seen some specific niches on the internet, but this takes the cake.

This works on DuckDuckGo.

https://support.google.com/websearch/thread/257110502/why-doesn-t-advanced-search-work-anymore?hl=en

Not google.

That looks like a bug. It used to work and should still work, unless they broke it in some instances for some reason.

That is a bug report wondering why it isn’t working for that user, not a statement that it doesn’t work on Google for a reason. If anything, that bug report says it has and should work on google.

e: and the response says it works for at least some people, with only 15 people ‘agreeing’ with the report. Considering their hundreds of millions of users, 15 is microscopic. It’s a bug from 2 1/2 years ago. Could be something weird with a 3rd party browser (that bug report doesn’t give any details on what OS or browser the user was using). I just tested it and it’s working for me. If it’s not working for you, you should submit a bug report, because it should.

NOT Pinterest

You can also put -word to filter out any results with that word in them

It wasn't working for me on duckduckgo earlier today. I searched something like imagewriter manual -II and almost every result was about the II and had II in the title. Hopefully that was just a weird temporary problem and they aren't removing it

and +word to include the word in the results

-site:pinterest.com works on Google

I've always capitalised my boolean terms (like AND, or OR, or NOT). Can anyone confirm or deny that booleans are case sensitive?

If you want to go down the rabbit hole, it's something called "Google Dorking" in the OSINT community, and can help you find rather specific things. Here's a cheat sheet I quickly found, where they also mention this collection for finding sensitive stuff.

Other search engines implement some (but generally not all) of these advanced search operators.

DuckDuckGo has this fun thing I use all the time, called bangs, which can speed up your browsing speed a bit if there's a specific site you want to search, like Dictionary.com - !di equilibrium. Some other search engines have also implemented this to some degree.

::: spoiler Tap for bonus
If you're on Linux using KDE, you can set up KRunner to do the same thing as bangs, but even more directly! And you can use this to search with specific engines, or even use permanent filters like -site:facebook.com, if you wish.
:::

Ysk search is broken and you really dont have any control over wuat it returns anymor

I use it constantly when searching for items I want to buy for projects. -Amazon always works for me.

You Should Know: there are search engines out there that do respect them and factor them in

I was wondering this, feels scary to not NOT for some reason

does plus +word differ from quotes "word" for including a single specific word?

Try NOT II