Why don't quotes in a Google search always work?

[LAS14]

If I search for "monty python," I get the expected hits. Nothing on snakes, for instance.

But if I search for "soup-rice" I get over a million hits, all visible ones for chicken rice soup. I wanted to find out what a DUer meant by "soup-rice" as a response to a post.

I've bumped into this problem frequently.

tia
las

[Arkansas Granny]

1. I don't know the post you're referring to, but was soup-rice a word play on surprise?

[LAS14]

5. Huh! I bet it was. Thanks. nt

[Laelth]

2. Get rid of the hyphen in soup-rice.

Because of the hyphen, Google sees that as one word. Your quotation marks aren’t affecting the search at all. A search for “soup rice” (two words) will limit the search to Google articles that contain both words.

-Laelth

[LAS14]

6. But if I just limit the search to those two words, I get a million chicken rice soup recipes.

What I want DOES have a dash in it.

Another post in this thread suggests that I'll never find it because it's a word play on surprise. But I'd still like to know how to search for it.

[mitch96]

3. I get a similar problem when trying to omit a word.. In the past if I put in a space and a negative

sign that word would not show up in the search.. like Democrat -republican
Most times it works and nothing with republican shows up. Every so often it would show up.. werid
m

[David__77]

4. I think putting quotes around one word can prevent that.

It’s not intuitive that the quotes would make a different in the case of one word- my recollection is that it does.

[CloudWatcher]

7. Good question!

And ... it seems that the answer is that you can't! Google treats hyphens as word-breaks in the source material. Seems like a bug, but it's the way it's designed.

An old query for something very similar: https://support.google.com/websearch/thread/3544867?hl=en

And ... I checked and there are very similar problems with both Bing and DuckDuckGo.

It seems like a bug that should be fixed, either at Google or one of their competitors