Suppose you want to search the web for the word “cback”, but Google assumes a misspelling of “back” and substitutes that? How do you force a search explicitly for “cback”?
Google for
+cback
You’ll still get a suggestion as to alternate spellings, but it will do the search.
That’ll be a dollar.
I don’t know how it appears to you, but if I search for cback I get a page roughly like this:
Did you mean crack?
Showing the top two results
Norwegian wikipedia page for Crack (loan word in the financial collapse sense)
English wikipedia page for Crack Cocain
Results for cback
(3 530 000 of them)
ETA: searching for +cback changes the page to
Did you mean +crack?
Results for cback
This is what I get for +cback.
WAG… does typing “cbak” into the google search box accomplish what you want? Be sure to inclue the quotes.
Yes, try quotes.
Oddly, when I put in cback (no quotes), I get cback. CBACK community, CBACK software, cback channel. I also get:
Did you mean: cbak
Is cback just an example? I didn’t have any problem searching for it. Either way, typically when it wants to make a substituion it’ll say something along the lines of “We have included back results. Show only cback” And you can click on the second link.
I think you’ve got the start of a rap song here.
“cback” wasn’t just an example. It’s an option in a graphing program that sets the color of the background. When I searched for it, practically all the hits were for “back”.
Today the result is different, and I get all results for “cback” and none for anything else, at least on the first few pages. Putting it in quotes changes the number of results by a few percent but the earliest hits look identical. For some reason it isn’t a problem anymore.
Oh, and this hit didn’t appear yesterday:
How to Google an unusual word that looks like a common but …8 posts - 6 authors - Last post: 10 hours ago
Suppose you want to search the web for the word “cback”, … I don’t know how it appears to you, but if I search for cback I get a page roughly like this: …
boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=12920294
Squink:
But the minus may remove legit articles which contain both cback and back.
The right answer (in my experience) is that Google *offers * alternative searchs with what it thinks are spelling corrections, but actually *does *what you typed.
ETA: Slow typing. The OP’s latest reply wasn’t there when I started. Not trying to pile on.
Sure, but that doesn’t matter in terms of getting the info you want when there are many of legit articles containing only cback.
But this wasn’t true. The searches I got were based on “back”, they weren’t optional.
In a related issue, I also did searches with “cost” in them, and got back hits that had “price” highlighted, for example the surname “Price” and especially the firm “Price Waterhouse”. These weren’t an offered alternative, they were in the main list of hits.
Do you get what you want if you type ~ cback background color ~ ? Not the first ghit or two but down the page a bit I see some stuff that appears it might be germane.
Janeslogin, I did come up with alternative strategies like adding other words, and resolved my cback problem since then. It still left me curious, though, whether it was possible to force Google to use the term I entered rather than their guess at a corrected version of it. I have a quirky hatred of things that automatically incorrectly reinterpret what I specify, and like to know ways of circumventing them.
That’s incorrect. Quite often it will just overrule whatever you typed and substitute a similar spelling without even asking. For example, it’s nearly impossible to search for my last name in combination with any other search term, as Google insists on searching for “border” instead of “norder”. If I wonder, Hey, do I have pictures of my cats online? and search for norder cat it will show a ton of pages that are about cats on the border. If you put quotes around the word in question, even if it’s a single word and not a phrase, (so, for example, “norder” cat) it will actually do what it should have done in the first place.
Certain words automatically include their equivalents in search. The documented way of getting around this is to place a plus sign (+) in front of the search term, but apparently using quotes will work as well.
Usually misspellings are not on the equivalents list. Google may go ahead and correct the misspelling, but it will include the option to disable it. This is entirely based on the number of relevant results.
The equivalence list, on the other hand, appears to be hardcoded. And there appear to be very few that are added anymore, with the automatic system mentioned above.