Let’s say I wanted to find websites that had the terms “bacon and eggs” but wanted to omit websites that had “bacon, and eggs”. Is there a way of searching Google that subtracts the latter from the former?
When I search “bacon and eggs” -“bacon, and eggs” I get no hits. When I search “bacon and eggs” or “bacon, and eggs”, I get the same number of hits. About 5,950,000 in case you were interested. Both these observations lead me to believe Google ignores the comma. Oh, and when I Google “google search with or without punctuation”, I learn from here that “Google Search usually ignores punctuation that isn’t part of a search operator.”
To my knowledge, there is no way of doing this. It’s not like the Alta Vista days or whatever where you can have a true exact match type of search. I don’t believe their databases are organized/optimized in this way, but I’m sure somebody better informed will be able to elucidate.
Gotcha ya! Well, if I can’t do what I need to, at least it’s good to know that it wasn’t incompetency on my end! I was sure I was going to end up using the :smack: emoji!
I don’t think that the algorithms are advanced enough yet to do anything defiantly.
The comma makes some difference, but I’m not sure exactly what. When I search for bacon and eggs (in quotes) I get 7,640,000 results. When I search for bacon, and eggs (in quotes) I get 6,640,000 results.
Advanced Search should help you. The comma does actually matter when it is inside quotes - joining the two searches will get the maximum amount of hits, using the smaller one first with an exclusion will return zero.
I’m not sure how it works, though. Just for fun, I searched under “search for the exact phrase” “bacon, and eggs” to find only results that are verbatim “bacon, and eggs”, but all the first page (I didn’t look beyond) were simply “bacon and eggs”, “bacon AND eggs” and “Bacon and Eggs” with no regard to punctuation or case. So it doesn’t seem to care about the comma, from what I see.