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Google Images: error when you search for anything that starts with a dash

17 pointsby TonnyGaricabout 6 years ago

3 comments

azhenleyabout 6 years ago
The <i>-</i> excludes the next term from results, so you are searching for nothing here.<p>A normal Google search returns no result, so Images must be handling it differently.
samjbobbabout 6 years ago
The dash is the NOT operator. This is the error that occurs when the query contains only NOT terms. It’s common to check for this special case in query processing and throw an error. Otherwise it’s easy to write a query that returns all or nearly all of the documents in the index.<p>Try `-1 2`, `-1 -2`, and `1 2`
protothomasabout 6 years ago
More interestingly perhaps searching for “&lt;term&gt; -n to n” where n is an integer returns no results (e.g <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.co.uk&#x2F;search?q=google+-1+to+1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.co.uk&#x2F;search?q=google+-1+to+1</a>