Exact String Search impossible ?

[xApple]

Hello everyone,
I was wondering if it just me or is google really missing this function ? Which would be quite odd considering it's the largest search engine on our planet..

I wanted to perform a search for a simple string containing a slash "/" character. The exact search was for A/ROSE
The problem is that Google kicks out the slash character and performs a search for "A ROSE" which is not at all the the same thing.

I tried surrounding it with quotes, a +, I even tried "A\/ROSE", but nothing works. I then tested 6 other popular search engines: they all had the same behavior.

The closest I got to solving my problem was when I hit http://www.google.com/codesearch where one can enter REGEX expressions. Unfortunately it only searches c code.

I finally came across http://www.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=430 which actually tells us that's not possible to perform such a search o_O ?!

How did they get where they are while actually having such features missing in their search engine ?

Is there any other engine that could run my search ?

[xApple]

Originally Posted by beu

Is this what you want to do?
http://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%3AA%2FROSE

No.. besides it still returns results for "A ROSE" and not "A/ROSE"

[beu]

Originally Posted by xApple

No.. besides it still returns results for "A ROSE" and not "A/ROSE"

Got ya, I've not searched something like this before.

[beu]

I assume this is a math problem?

[xApple]

No.. It's just the name of a extension for Mac OS 7.5 that seams to be causing problems in my emulation boot stage. I wanted to gather some info about it.. but apparently google search is quite limited.

[beu]

Ahhh ha, the problem is the / and the fact it is in so many URLs.

Does "a/" mean "a drive"?

either way try your search here but try to avoid using the / symbol:
http://www.google.com/mac.html

[xApple]

No, the fact that "/" is the separator character for URLs has no relevance in my problem. The issue is simply that google refuses to perform a search with that character in it. It simply removes it every single time from my search query. Using the mac specific page doesn't help either. The word "rose" is still much too common.

[beu]

No, the fact that "/" is the separator character for URLs has no relevance in my problem.

Maybe not on your end but perhaps on Google's end.

Either way, I submitted this to see if it is a bug.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/bugs/

[xApple]

Yes it might be Google that chose to eliminate the "/" character form it's search capabilities because of that... but it's not the only character, queries with any of these characters will get modified, deleted and processed differently than the users wishes:

@ ? ! . % & / ( ) -

(non-exhaustive list)

I think it's crazy Google's search only supports letters... how did they get to be #1 with such a crappy engine ?

[beu]

Unlike "C++" and "$10" there seems to be no workaround in this case. Sorry!