I am a C++ programmer/developer between jobs, so I have registered at several job listing boards. I have tried searching for ‘C++’, ‘“C++”’, and ‘“C plus plus”’ on those boards; while the second and third terms significantly reduce the sheer number of responses that I get from the first search term, I still get requirements for C# developers and air duct installers, presumably because of the ‘C’ in ‘A/C’.
I should note that I include “programmer” or “developer” with the other search terms, but not all search engines automatically assume “AND” between terms.
Some boards allow me to exclude certain terms, like “Java”, “ASP”, or “web”, but some do not. Some boards allow me to specify “must include all words”, but some do not. Some allow me to use Boolean terms like AND, OR, and NOT; some do not. The obvious solution would be for the job boards to stop throwing away all non-alphanumeric characters and search based on what I type, but I don’t anticipate them changing just for me.
When I read some of the posts on the SDMB, I am sometimes amazed at the Google Fu possessed by various posters, so I am asking for help in constructing search terms that will help me match on the specific term “C++”.
Caveat: I performed a search of this forum looking for “C++”, but was told that “C” was too short to return a reasonable amount of matches. Do you see what I am saying?
You can use google to search the sdmb. For example, if you do a google search for “C++ site:straightdope.com” you get a lot of hits. At a quick glance most of them are programming questions so you’ll still need to figure out what other terms to search for to make it worthwhile. That will get you around the SDMB short word limitation though.