Hacker News Reader

Honestly, there should be some sort of never-forget meme about Google removing the + operator when they started up their stupid social network that failed and then never put it back >:(

Just checked wikipedia, and it seems it'll be ten years ago this June that google stole + and forced quoting upon us for pure vanity reasons.

View on HN

If someone is wondering (like I did) what the + operator was for:

foo +bar +baz

was equivalent to

foo "bar" "baz"

It stood for logical AND, so really your search term would be read as:

foo AND bar AND baz. It would be more accurate to type it as foo + bar + baz.

They've unfortunately conflated "must have" and "spelled exactly", which aren't the same thing.

This explains so much. I thought they were distinct operators. I thought quoting meant must match exactly, and the plus meant must be present. So +"baz" meant it must be exactly baz, and it must be present. +baz meant baz, or some variant like bazzes must be present.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com