How can I get Google to do an EXACT match for a search term?

Factual Questions
1

In the past few years, Google searches have often resulted in a ton of results that include near-misses for the search term.

For example, if I’m looking for the possessive of a word, results includes the non-possessive. If I’m searching for two words, search results will include a compound word that includes the two words. Vice-versa, if I’m looking for a compound word, the results will include the separate words. Now I’m finding that Google will include the non-gerund version of a word if I’m searching for a word that is a gerund or present participle; for example, it will give me results for “zone” in a search that includes “zoning”.

How can I get Google to search for the EXACT match of a word, and not give me near-misses in the result?

2

Did you try putting your search term in quotation marks?

3

It doesn’t work. It looks like Google made their auto-correction work at some very low level, below that of phrase searches.

For instance, try searching for “US”. It considers United States to be an exact match and highlights it.

4

Not sure you can. I doubt Google has the original text in the search index, just the tags that the engine believes are associated with the document. It’s already decided that the document will match “zone” and “zoning” before you’ve typed in your search term. They have to do that to make the search fast; they can’t actually look at the documents when searching.

5

How about clicking the “advanced search” link right next to the text box and entering what you want in the “find web pages with this exact wording or phrase” box?

And if you want “zone” without “zoning”, you can do this: “zone -zoning”. That’ll eliminate matches with the word “zoning” in them.

6

It doesn’t appear that there is anything more powerful than using the quotation marks. If you are absolutely, positively sure that the page you want does not have the alternative form you can exclude the alternative form of the word. For example, *“zoning” -zone *or *“us” -united *.

Edit: Now you need a search method that weeds out duplicate answers.

7

Try adding a plus sign (+) in front of the word.

This:
city zone
gives me broader results than this:
city +zone

8

But this will also eliminate anything that has both words in it, which might not be what the OP wants.

9

Google knows what you need. Do not question The Google.

I keep making this offer on various message boards - I will pay someone a finders fee - real money - if they can find me a search engine that will find only exact matches for an arbitrary character string (including punctuation and whitespace). I don’t care if it’s a site I have to pay to use. But no one has ever found me one.

I’m not sure it’s possible, really, because of the way search engines work. But what might work is a program that scans through the results of a broader Google search.

10

Also in advanced search…try using AND, OR, and NOT.

11

All you typically need to do is put the search term in quotes and put a + sign in front of it.

Thus:

+“I only want to search for this phrase”

12

I tried exactly that.

It returned exactly one hit. This thread!

13

I’m impressed, this really does seem to do what I thought Google couldn’t do in real time. I searched on my last name and except for a bizarre Japanese message board that happens to use my last name for the domain, every other hit was page with me or one of my relatives, all 29 pages of links.

14

People have told me I do a search wrong by wasting time using the + sign and quotes, but it really makes a difference even if they don’t see it. I have noticed that there is a point at which the + and - entries stop being included. I can’t tell you how many is too many though.