HN Explorer

Ask HN: How do I force Google to search using plural

1 points by kooshball ↗ HN
I was looking for information on https libraries. On google https will return a bunch of results for http, which is totally useless to me. I tried both +https and "https" and neither seem to affect the results. Is there some other trick I'm missing?

3 comments

[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 18.1 ms ] thread
dekhn
+ is no longer a Google Search operator. Quoting a word is.

What query did you do, specifically, and what kind of HTTPS libraries are you looking for?

If I do [ https ] almost all links on the SERP contain the literal string HTTPS.

If I do [ "https" ] every link on the SERP contains the literal string HTTPS.

In both cases, the results are nearly worthless. So, you must be trying something like

[ "https" libraries ]

Again, that returns only moderately relevant results (all the matches contain https literal text, but it's not a nice list of https libraries).

Being more specific is going to guide the engine to understand your intent more clearly. For example [ "https" programming library for C++ ] finds a nice list of HTTPS libraries, including this link about half-way down (personally, I would prefer that was on top):

C/C++ libraries for HTTP programming - Stack Overflow stackoverflow.com/questions/.../c-c-libraries-for-http-programming Sep 15, 2010 - C/C++ libraries for HTTP programming [duplicate] ... What well known C/C++ libraries are out there that could allow one to implement servlets, or at least provide most of the essentials for .... Self contained http/https library ...

Note the search engine noticed the page has https text in it, even though the title does not. The page points at libcurl, which seems like a good answer.

Another detail is that there are both server and client libraries for https, you should probably specify which you want:

[ "https" client library for c++ ]

and in fact, that SERP is pretty great (first two links are both great starting points).

dekhn
Oh, and [ "https" client ] also does a pretty good job.
wanda
This. Try being more specific, but not only with what you are looking for, but also with what you are not looking for.

- is still an operator and excludes words so you could say:

  -http -public
to exclude results about actual public libraries with books, and also to exclude http.

Likewise you have

  intitle:

  filetype:

  ext:

  intext:

  allintitle:

  allintext:
etc.