Negative-Only Searches in Google

I was inspired by another 'blog post to confirm that Google allows negative-only searching. And they do. I can't fathom this ever being useful except to build odd games (Google slap fight?) but it's possible.

Just omit a word from a search without adding any words, like this:

-the

That'll get you 500,000,000 results, though if you go to the advanced search and limit your results to English it drops to a mere 287,000,000 results. If you run a search for the without the minus you get 3.4 billion results so there you are.

If you get all Zen and do a search for the -the you will not get any Web results. However you WILL get a result from the Forsyth County Genealogical Society in Google Print.

Speaking of Zen if you exclude the one time (-the) you get one result count, but if you exclude the two times (-the -the) you get a slightly lesser results count. I suppose something can have none of something, and then have even less than that.

If you search for the twice and then omit it once (the the -the) you will still not get Web results but you will get ads. You'll also get results from Google shopping.

If you negative search for the five times (-the -the -the -the -the -the) you don't get the ads, but you do get shopping results and 499,000,000 Web results.

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