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Comment by sjmulder | Hacker News Reader

“Less aggressive synonyms”

Fantastic! That’s one of the things that has been bothering me on Google lately.

The one that's been driving me crazy lately: 4 as a synonym for "for." I understand some percent of the population "rites lik dis 4 serch" -- but I certainly don't! When 4 = for, and "for" is on every page on the internet, it almost had me pulling my hair out.

Here's an example (but not my exact query). "iPhone 4" will match pages with "iPhone" and "for."

http://i.imgur.com/vN1oh.png

While incredibly annoying putting the 4 in quotes like this: "4" will eliminate "for" from your results.

I've been wondering. How do I do that and also search for the exact phrase "iPhone 4"? Do I type "iPhone 4" "4"?

(edit: this seems to work.)

Someone should write a browser extension or Greasemonkey script to automatically quote your Google search terms.

Not an extension, but:

http://finderr.org

Disclaimer: I made that, but I gain nothing from its usage and don't collect any private information (like the search terms).

I discovered the "verbatim" option under the "More search tools" link on the left hand side recently.

http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

It's not as convenient as an extension or a script, of course.

It should be easy enough to write an extension or even a bookmarklet for this. You just have to add &tbs=li:1 to the end of the URL to enable "verbatim" mode.

I have one such extension on my PC (but I am on my phone now, sorry. )

“Less aggressive synonyms”

For the love of god, yes.

I just did a search where Google conveniently decided to substitute "bike" and "bicycle" for the word "cycle" (as in "a series of repeated events")

Sigh.

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