Tuesday, December 7, 2010

When to use the + operator, the most misunderstood of them all

If you're a user of the search engines, you know about the minus operator to exclude terms from your results.

Example:  To find salsa recipes that do NOT have tomatoes in them,

[ salsa recipe -tomatoes ] 

That does just what you think, returning results that do NOT have the word "tomatoes" on the page.

So.... what does + do?

Most people think it means the opposite of minus, but, alas, is doesn't.  (Although I agree that would make sense!)

This what + means:  DO NOT change the search term in any way.  No synonyms, no stems, no nothing.  Search for exactly this word.  (In other words, it's very much like double-quote for a single word.)

Example:  My Mom told me yesterday that she was going to hear some "authentic joiker music" at the local Scandanavian outlet.  She was excited about it, and I naturally asked "so... what's joiker?"

A quick Google search for joiker is pretty useless--all of the results are about JOKER as the word gets spell-corrected to something I didn't really want.

This is when you want to use +

[ +joiker ]

And that tells you pretty quickly that it's a traditional Sami (aka Lapplander) style of singing.  It's pretty interesting, actually... Wikipedia tells us (with a spell-correction to yoik) that a joik is a song that tries to "transfer the essence" of a person or place to the listener, rather than being "about" a person or place.

In other words, + is the same as the Bing command noalter:  (example, on Bing:  [ noalter:joiker ]  )


Double quotes (on both Google and Bing) serve to turn off synonymization for strings of words.  Example:

[ "joik music" ] 



Handy sometimes.

Search on!

2 comments:

  1. Hi, this was a really great post. I´m a serch-reporter for IDG Brazil and would like to translte this post for my post tomorrow. Accurate translation guarantee and full credit too. What do you think?
    please let me know

    Tks

    klaus

    webjournalism@hotmail.com

    ReplyDelete