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Comment by aww_dang | Hacker News Reader

Double quotes are your friend. Not excusing how irrelevant the results have become, but when you anticipate this behavior, use the exact phrase method.

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Double quotes hasn't worked in a long time. It used to be the case that if you search "foo" "bar" it would only return documents that had the words "foo" and "bar".

I will frequently search for z foo bar z, get documents that have synonyms of foo and bar (and the synonyms will be highlighted in the snippet), then I will search "foo" "bar" and get the same documents except now it doesn't highlight the synonyms in the snippet. Maybe I am in some awful cohort where this feature is intentionally broken to see if it reduces engagement.

Make sure your quotes are plain quotes and not smart quotes.

They used to have a bug with those

>Double quotes hasn't worked in a long time

Same here, but seems to be 30/70. 30% of the time it works.

A while ago I was looking at an odd NetBSD issue and searched using "NetBSD". I got a few results on top, but most of the results on the first page were OpenBSD without any mention of NetBSD.

-"OpenBSD" as a negative quoted keyword in these cases.

Once you get your query dialed in, prepare to take the Turing test.

What I can tell is quoting and verbatim is clearly broken. The accuracy is not up to what it was 5 years ago. For example searching for the exact sentence in a news article, you won't find the article.

They would be, except it ignores them sometimes.

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