Posted by on October 31st, 2011 View Comments
Posted in Miscellaneous |
For the average user, Google is a treasure trove of numerous things waiting to be uncovered and learned. However, for the adept user, it’s a superhighway of information. If you know the right keys to use and the right keywords to punch in, you can easily find what you are looking for.
What makes searches on Google more powerful aren’t the searches alone, but using the right operators or syntaxes. For example, have you ever used the “+” sign while searching in Google before? It was one of the oldest search operators in Google and was used the first time the site was up and running.
If you haven’t tried using the “+” sign while searching or haven’t heard about it at all, then you have missed out on one of the simplest yet most powerful conventions in Google. Yes, there used to be a Google + search operator, which came in way earlier than Google+ (the social network.) The syntax has been available since the start of Google.
How the Google + Search Operator Works
The search operator was simply used by typing the plus (+) sign before the phrase or words that you were looking for. Basically, its purpose was when you wanted to search for a word or a phrase and want the results with the exact words or phrases. Because Google likes to match several terms (often unrelated to your search) to your searches, the + operator was very helpful because it only gave you what you needed in the results. Today, if you type in the + sign before the words or phrase you are searching, Google will automatically ignore it right away.
How to Restrict Searches Today
So, without the + operator, how do you restrict your results to whatever it is that you want? To do so, now you have to put a quotation mark before and after the term to make sure that Google matches the word precisely. While that’s also easy to do, more and more power-users are complaining because of course, typing the + sign before or in between the words is definitely easier than using quotation marks.
This change was made without any announcement. In fact, users were just shocked to find out eventually that the + operator no longer worked at all. Because there was no announcement, no reasons were given as to why the change was made.
Why Did Google Remove the + Search Operator?
Once again, because Google made no announcement on such change, no reasons were given. Hence, we can only speculate. Many users say that its because of the new Google+ Social network. Perhaps, Google does not want the + search operator to be confused with Google+ especially now that the site uses the + sign to mention friend’s names, quite similar to the @ mention syntax of Facebook or @ reply syntax of Twitter. Continuing either would probably create conflict, and with the growing popularity of Google+, they may have decided to let go of the former.
Considering that the + operator was one convention that was there ever since the start of Google in 1997, numerous power users are sad to see its demise. After all, it has been used by many Google power-uses to make their searches easier to do. Unfortunately, its doom was inevitable, given the fact that the need for Google+ profile searching and replying would have to come first.
