Search operators Operators turn a search box into a filter over a crawled index. The cost is that you are querying somebody's index , not the web — coverage, freshness and operator fidelity vary enormously between engines. The mistake beginners make is assuming their query ran as typed. Google routinely drops, stems, and synonym-expands your terms, so a zero-result dork and a silently-rewritten dork look nothing alike but are equally useless. Which engine for which job | You want | Go to | Why | |---|---|---| | Broad coverage of mainstream web | Google | Largest index, worst operator fidelity…