Once upon a time on Google

[Larz60+]

In the early days of Google, after it had matured some, you could ask for an exact match using something like:

+ 'pdf to print' + ...

and you would only get a match on items that actually contained 'pdf to print'

I loved it when it cooperated!

now, all you get is 'print to pdf' which as developers we all know is not what was asked for.

Is there another way that I don't know about to format this, or perhaps a developer version of Google or some other search engine where I can get what I ask for?

[metulburr]

I think you just now prepend your search with

filetype:pdf 

Unless you mean you are actually searching for that text?

[Larz60+]

the quotes used to mean exact quote, and the + means that it must exist for a match to be valid.
I don't think the rule has changed, but the software (like many things today) bends the rules.

[metulburr]

I think the + also searches Google+ pages or groups phrases together....but i could be wrong

I feel like they broadened their results to common searches as if you search that you get hits for 'print a pdf' which is not what was searched for.

[wavic]

See these two:
https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition...dork-query
https://gist.github.com/stevenswafford/3...375d5e8cdc

[metulburr]

yeah they got rid of +
http://www.googleguide.com/quote_operator.html

[Larz60+]

Ok, didn't know about + being eliminated, but there are some cool hacks in wavic's links
so I tried my "pdf to print" with just the quotes, and it actually did return some exact matches, but threw in some inverted ones as well. Still helpful!

[metulburr]

Yeah they just enhanced double quotes

[wavic]

Google dorks/commands are changing constantly so some of the examples may not work.