Dots, brackets etc in Google and other search engines

[Hakim]

One thing that bugs me about Google is the way it handles - or more accurately don't handle - dots and brackets and other special symbols included in the search expression. It simply ignores them and includes search results with them even if the search expression didn't have them.

Example: if I enter a search for .isOpen() I'll also get results including: isOpen(), .isOpen and even is Open. Quote marks won't help.

Otoh, if I enter a plain quote I get results where there is a dot (ie the end of one sentence and beginning of the next) or hyphen between the words within the quote. I guess that can be useful sometimes but quite often those hits are completely irrelevant.

So the question is: can this "help" be disabled in Google if I want to make a strict search or are there any good search engines out there where dots etc is handled better?

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

There was (maybe still is) a Google Code Search or something like this if you want to look that up

 

[Hakim]

Thanks! That's spot on, it seems. As hinted I most often have this problem when searching for code. Will need to refresh my regexp then.

I'd still be interested in a non programming search engine that doesn't put dots, hyphens, colons etc in the quote if there wasn't one in the search expression, if there is one.

 

[Mise]

Yeah, I find this incredibly annoying too.