:0)

This seems like a disastrous approach. How is Google supposed to divine intentions when they pertain to rapidly developing ephemeral events like the launches of shitty books?

They have a limited amount of stuff to engage in term/phrase sense disambiguation wherein they suggest frequently occurring senses of it, but that is by no means a central focus of searching and indexing. Taking that to its logical conclusion is a recipe for brittleness and wasted money. Wasting the talents of thousands of brilliant PhDs on wild goose chases like guessing what every little cryptic two/three-word query means is a terrible idea.

This search took perhaps 5 minutes to find an appropriate page in the results and navigate to the following paragraph from the Southwest Airlines blog. It was the 4th result, and I had to guess that it might contain info (by implication negative, as it happens) about service to LAX. The closest appears to be San Diego.

An ABC report on Southwest’s return to SFO was result 2, but didn’t include route info.

Note that my search was improved by *not* including LAX, since, as it happens, service to LAX is not part of the story – hence not mentioned on the target pages.

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Just as we promised, we�re bringing our LUV Jets back to San Francisco International Airport (SFO)! Effective on Sunday, August 26th, Southwest begins nonstop service between SFO and San Diego, Las Vegas, and Chicago Midway, with direct or connecting service to 46 additional airports from sea to shining sea. We�ll offer eight flights each weekday between SFO and San Diego; seven each weekday between SFO and Las Vegas; and three each day between SFO and Chicago Midway. Southwest�s SFO service will operate from Terminal 1, Concourse B, gates 25 and 31. (Click here for more details.)
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Or perhaps I neglected to enter the word in the spam checker and I’m simply paranoid…

The + operator was definitely present in Altavista, although I don’t know if they were the originators. For those who might not be familiar, the meaning of the “big three” operators is as folows:

Quotes: Enclosing a portion of the search string in quotes (“”) mandates that the target document must contain that exact phrase

Plus: The + operator indicates that the prefaced word or phrase *must* appear in the document. Example:

+Harry +Potter

implies that both the term Harry and the term Potter must appear in a returned document. This is the Boolean “AND” condition.

Search default is the “OR” condition where all documents containing either “Harry” or “Potter “might be returned. Of course, Google then uses its own mysterious “relevance” algorithms which in practice bring the results containing both “Harry” and “Potter” to the top of the list. Probably with a preference for the exact phrase “Harry Potter”. However, I prefer not to rely on a relevance algorithim – especially one which is not open source.

Minus: The – operator is an exclusion. The returned document must *not* contain the prefixed word or phrase. I fund this useful in refining results after I get a large number of unwanted hits with similar content in common.

People who just type in keywords without using operators are putting their trust in an unknown relevance algorithim which is constantly being tweaked and retweaked and is driven in large part by commercial concerns – i.e. People with commercial sites try to “optimize” them for higher results ranking and Google constantly tries to tweak their algorithim to outwit Search Engine Optimization strategies that it sees as illegitimate.

I know those guys have billions of dollars, and I don’t, but I’d rather see plain simple usable search which does not treat the user as a pawn in a commercial chessgame.

-Steve