Google-search – How to search for things within this year with Google

Just announced by Google, searching for special characters is greatly improved.

The catch? You need to search for at least two or three characters.

Now for queries containing sequences of 2-3 special characters such as [== vs ===] and [+=], Google will return results on the meaning of these sequences in programming languages.

For example, if you’re searching for the meaning of [c++17], you will get results for the well-known programming language instead of c17, which brings up a Boeing airplane. Additionally, organization and product names that include punctuation, such as She++ and Notepad++, will return more accurate results.

+= is even called out specifically as an example string.

As with all Google improvements, this is likely rolling out in stages, and may not be available in all languages.

You can simply add additional keywords to your search. Adding keywords will always reduce the amount of results you get since it uses an AND search by default.

To prove that you can do this even when OR is used, try typing the following into Google's advanced search:

• all these words: a b
• one or more of these words: c OR d

You will notice that it results in the following Google query: a b c OR d

Thus, you can conclude that the OR operator only works on single words. In other words, you can think of your query as a b (c OR d).

Furthermore, if you try to include multiple words in one of the OR text boxes (e.g. let's use d e instead of d), you will get the query: a b c OR "d e".