Edit: i’ll update this list of search engines that are alleged (up to you, the Reader, to verify) not to respect special search operators:

  • owoarchist said Google

Keep your previous search terms but add “NOT” then whatever the word thats coming up that you want to exclude from search results since its not relevant to what you’re looking for

I just intuited and put this to use a moment ago and it works and helped filter down things substantially

  • Havatra@lemmy.zipEnglish
    2·
    3 days ago

    If you want to go down the rabbit hole, it’s something called “Google Dorking” in the OSINT community, and can help you find rather specific things. Here’s a cheat sheet I quickly found, where they also mention this collection for finding sensitive stuff.

    Other search engines implement some (but generally not all) of these advanced search operators.

    DuckDuckGo has this fun thing I use all the time, called bangs, which can speed up your browsing speed a bit if there’s a specific site you want to search, like Dictionary.com - !di equilibrium. Some other search engines have also implemented this to some degree.

    Tap for bonus

    If you’re on Linux using KDE, you can set up KRunner to do the same thing as bangs, but even more directly! And you can use this to search with specific engines, or even use permanent filters like -site:facebook.com, if you wish.