On Sat, 2 Mar 2013 18:27:15 -0800, Gary Kline wrote: > On Sat, Mar 02, 2013 at 07:43:50PM -0600, Joshua Isom wrote: > > On 3/2/2013 2:43 PM, David Tilbrook wrote: > > >The problem (and its solution) have been > > >raised for at least 39 years. > > > > But google and other search engines treats words([A-Za-z0-9]) > > starting with - as meaning exclude results with this, even when > > obvious it's about unix commands. It can be rather annoying when > > searching for help. > > _______________________________________________ > > > sorry to be so dense; can you give me a few concrete examples? ya > lost me!
Just as one of many examples, google for "find -name" (without the quotes of course), a typical combination which the "AND NEAR" search should return sufficient results for. Compare the list of results to what you would expect. Now, google for "find -name" _including_ the quotes (!) in order to have google treat the search string literally. The results will be different, as you would expect. In ye olde times when search engine meant altavista.digital.com (if I remember correctly), search strings usually needed to include + (AND) and - (AND NOT) if you wanted to construct a search term consisting of more than one word. With google implying a "+ prefix" for every search word _and_ assuming they should be as near as possible to each other (therefor the name "AND NEAR" for the kind of search) this became obsolete. Almost, as it seems... -- Polytropon Magdeburg, Germany Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0 Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ... _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"