Google Search – How to Search Effectively on Google
google-search
It's a little meta…
.. But how do I "properly" search for something like Visual C++ Executable Stack on Google?
(See below for an illustration of the problem.)
Best Answer
You reached an edge case, there is not much you can do other than exclude Stack Overflow from the search -site:. Search all other sites and then search with Stack Overflow instead. No combination of searches can help this.
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".
Best Answer
You reached an edge case, there is not much you can do other than exclude Stack Overflow from the search
-site:
. Search all other sites and then search with Stack Overflow instead. No combination of searches can help this.