Jan Claeys <[email protected]> writes: > On Tue, 2025-06-24 at 07:27 -0500, Richard Owlett wrote: >> Side Issue -- Google and DuckDuckGo seem more interested in quantity >> rather than quality. Any pointers to search engine with friendly >> Boolean search? TIA > > "You" "can" "try" "putting" "double" "quotes" "around" "every" "word" > AND "word group" OR -use -dashes -to -exclude > > https://www.lifehack.org/articles/technology/20-tips-use-google-search-efficiently.html > https://www.lifewire.com/bing-advanced-search-3482817 > > ... might also be useful (DDG is based on Bing)
In the past with DDG '-' excluded and '+' included, but now that is no the case. Rather, to quote from https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/syntax the meaning is the following: cats -dogs Fewer dogs in results cats +dogs More dogs in results Just after this change was made several years ago, I found that in some cases, adding '-foo' actually lead to more results containing 'foo' than when 'foo' was omitted completely, presumably because less 'foo' is potentially still more than no 'foo'. I did complain to DDG at the time and I have the impression that the issues has now been fixed. Cheers, Loris -- This signature is currently under constuction.
