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Lesson 3.3: The Minus Operator

Contents:

Using the minus operator

This is lesson 3.3. It's about how to remove those really annoying invasive words and terms that sometimes creep into your searches. You do a search, and you get a million results, but they're all polluted by something that you didn't really want. This is how to get rid of those not-so-great results, those invasive results. This is the use of what we call the minus operator, now like site or like filetype, this is a way to modify the query, to be more precise, to zoom in on just what it is you want to find.

Here's an example, so imagine that you're still on this Tesla coil kick so you might imagine doing a search for a Tesla coil but you don't want to see anything about circuits. You do a query like this one [ tesla coil -circuits ] what this does is when you do a search for just Tesla coil you get a bazillion results all about Tesla coils. That's what this ellipse represents, it shows the whole universe of results that are queued up, sought out, discovered through this Tesla coil query. But now when you say [ tesla coil -circuits ] what you see is a smaller set of results it has zoomed in, it's focused on the results that have Tesla coil but don't have the word circuits appearing anywhere in that.

Here's an example: Suppose that you want to say make salsa for dinner, you know that Mexican sauce that has garlic and jalapeno peppers and tomatoes typically in it, but we don't want the tomatoes. How do we do that? Let me show you the sequence of things I went through when I was discovering how to do this. I did a search like this [salsa] and you get a bunch of results about places that serve salsa, salsa recipes and these have lots and lots of tomatoes.

It's not what I'm looking for so I'm going to modify the query to just say [salsa recipe] maybe that'll be better. I'll get rid of all those other results, fantastic, I've got salsa recipes but they all have tomatoes in them.

I'm going to modify the query again I'm going to say this time [ salsa recipe -tomatoes] like that. And now, this is great, that's a recipe it's based on mangoes, it doesn't have tomatoes in it.

But if you scroll up a little bit let me show you something interesting. Here you see this, tomatillo, it's not a tomato it's a small kind of green thing that it's kind of in the same family as tomatoes but it's not really a tomato.

I don't want that either, so what I'll do is modify my query to be [ salsa recipe -tomatoes -tomatillo] like that. Now I've got nothing but results that have neither tomatoes in it or tomatillos in it. I just have pure salsa results, mango, papaya all kinds of stuff, but no tomatoes, so the trick here is to use the minus operator next to a term that you want to remove from your search results.

Suppose we're looking for a salsa and we didn't want to see that dancing stuff so we might get rid of salsa dancing by saying [ salsa -dancing]. We could also get rid of the tomatoes in those recipes by [salsa -dancing -tomatoes -tomatillos] whatever. Important thing to know, I see people get tripped up by this all the time, they put a space accidentally after the minus sign; do not do that. If you put a space after the minus sign it means that Google will not see the minus sign. It will go salsa something tomatoes, I want to give you double salsa tomatoes. That's probably not what you want. Now that you know how to use the site operator, have used filetype, and minus to target in on your search you are now empowered to do all kinds of very sophisticated searches. So now go ahead and click on the next arrow and see what you can do in the next activity.

(Updated 8/14/19 A. Awakuni Fernald)