Minus for minus and no plus

Google “gave up” on a feature for which it limited the capabilities of the search bar

The Google search engine no longer normally processes the “+” symbol in a query, the function of which was changed for the sake of the Google+ social network. reports this Search Engine Land .

Google introduced the feature, called "Direct Connect", in November 2011, a few months after the launch of Google+. It allowed users to go directly to the pages of companies and people on the social network, bypassing the search results.

For example, if a user began to enter the query “+youtube” into the search bar, a link to the video hosting page on Google+ was displayed in the first place in the list of suggestions. When you clicked on it, this page opened, and not the results of an Internet search.

However, Search Engine Land editors have noticed that this feature is no longer working. It is unknown when exactly this happened, although a Google representative confirmed the refusal.

As we moved forward, this function ceased to be the focus of our attention. Google Representative

It is noteworthy that in order to enable Direct Connect, Google excluded the “+” sign from the list of operators used in the search engine to clarify a query. Until October 2011, a plus in front of one of the words in the query allowed only those pages that mentioned the exact wording of that word to be displayed.

The minus sign, in turn, made it possible to exclude from the search results pages that contained a specific word. This operator remained in the search engine, while instead of the plus, Google recommended using quotation marks - they can enclose both individual words and phrases.

Now the “+” sign still affects search results, but exactly how much is unclear. For example, a search for the word “google”—either simply or with quotes—returns 17.75 billion results. And the request “+google” reduces the number of links in the search results to 1.77 million, and it mainly includes pages from Google+.

#Google #Google #search_queries #search engines #plus_in_Google