I often use boolean commas when searching by Google. Now they suddenly don't work anymore. I enter a search string in double quotation but google still finds only separate words and not exact phrases. What should I do to turn them back on? I didn't change any settings and for that matter I can't see any settings in google that regulate this.

I do not know what boolean commas are, can you provide an example?

Google is getting more friendly towards the casual user and as a result a bit less friendly towards power users.  Many of the advanced operators like double quotes, plus signs, AND, OR, etc ... are taken more as a hint rather than an absolute.  Google is constantly changing the search engine behavior so what works one day may not provide the same results on another.

The first search result after looking for quoted string "edward cigar" is King Edward Cigars, close but no cigar [pardon the pun], however many of the hits are exact matches.

Sorry, by Boolean commas I meant double quotation, like "edward cigars" you mentioned. But you see, up until this morning everything was just fine and now suddenly the search does not return exact search strings when using double quotation anymore. After clicking the "advanced search" link, I noticed that the search string in double quotation that I enter directly into the google search field gets erroneously assigned to the field "all these words" instead of "this exact wording or phrase". Whereas if I enter a word or a few words without any quotation marks alongside the search string in double quotation (e.g. candy "milk chocolate"), this word or words (in this case, candy) get assigned to "this exact wording or phrase". I don't understand how the hell this happened, I never had such a weird problem before. It's really bothersome because I use exact searching a lot, I need it for work purposes.

:) lately on looks like we have "Great Firewall" in action, try www.zapmeta.com as alternative ...

Hi Silvernight,

Would you mind giving us a bit more info?

- Which query did you search for using quotations?
- What results did you expect to find?
- What did you see?

All of these details will be helpful in figuring out what this issue is exactly and how it might be resolved.

Thanks,
Rubie

Hi Rubie,

You mean what exact query? Well, I enter very many different queries every day (I work as a translator, it's part of looking for information). Like I said, double quotation no longer works as it should. I mean it doesn't matter what query I enter, it simply does not return those exact phrases. Ok for example, I enter "the world is a happy place" in quotation marks and instead of getting search results with that exact phrase I get a buttload of results with those words scattered all over the place.

"the world is a happy place" gets expected search results for me using firefox 3.6 xp/sp3

I went through the same thing today, but then I realized this: I always just typed the beginning quotation mark and the exact phrase I needed, leaving out the ending quotation mark.  It always worked before today. For some reason though, you now have to type the ending quotation mark to get the exact search results. I dunno if that's your situation, but yeah, that was mine, and making sure I type out the ending quotation mark has fixed it for me.

Lesterroquefort, you're right, I realized the same. And also in order to get correct seach results, I have to enter separate words after the search in string in double quotation instead of before as I always did. Otherwise they get mixed up.

I find that quoted strings (with both quotation marks, and at the beginning of the search string) often do not work--and not always because the quoted phrase doesn't exist on the web. Google is doing too much second guessing. I would rather get "no results" than meaningless results. This especially seems to be the case with images.

The other problem with image results is that the image is not always related to the search string at all, but just happened to be on the same page with it. Not sure what could be done about that, but when you combine that with the loose interpretation of quoted strings, it can be a pretty pointless exercise.

Honestly, Google is great for a lot of things, but this one thing about the quoted strings can be pretty frustrating. I don't think it really benefits casual users, either, since they are not likely to use quoted strings unless someone suggested it to them after they couldn't find what they wanted with the usual methods. Then, at that point, they are going to want the same thing I do: exact results for quoted strings.

I've had Google ignore the quoted string entirely and just give me results for the other words in the search--even when I put a + sign before the quoted string. I thought + meant it was a mandatory term.

I will say, though, the minus sign seems to be working just fine, and I love it. :)