Google & YouTube - Universal Exact Search Hotkey

drhouse
2015-09-06T22:58:07Z

Surround selected text with quotation marks using NumpadAdd key

note: only works in Chrome (Firefox incompatible)

"Brillant addon, it save a looot of time in google search when you don't get consistent results :
CTRL+A and then Numpad+, much quicker than the manual way :) - review by Yoannjap"
v6.0 update: should work better and with more cases (part of an ongoing overhaul project to AI update all scripts)
v5.0 update: work on any input field on any site
v4.0 update: should work now on without requiring updates (Chrome tested, Google, YouTube, Bing)
v3.0 update: to work with current Google Search
v2.0 update: works on Bing, which also uses quotation marks syntax

How to Use:

"Adding Quotes"
- enter some text into the Google or Youtube search box (example: song lyrics)
- highlight-select a term or group from those words
- press the Numpad Add button on your keyboard, it's the '+' sign near your numpad keys
The word or phrase will be placed between quotation marks, search results will contain only your exact terms (boolean search).

advanced tip for text selection in search boxes:
- use Ctrl+LeftArrow and Ctrl+RightArrow to quickly navigate the cursor between the start of words
- use Shift+Ctrl+LeftArrow and Shift+Ctrl+RightArrow to quickly highlight-select entire words or phrases
- pressing the Numpad Add button will surround your text selection with quotation marks in the search box

Example Case:
This script automatically trims empty whitespaces at the end of a selected word or phrase, before wrapping it in quotation marks. This is because although a search term may be in quotation marks, if it contains 1 or more spaces at the end, Google treats it as though no quotation marks exist at all (see below).

*example search terms (AMD is a company name): Vive AMD VR

original entry | type of search | Google's results | Verdict
Vive AMD VR | inexact (no quotations) | Vive and vr | FAIL
"Vive" "AMD " "VR" | inexact (space at end of AMD) | Vive and vr | FAIL
"Vive" "AMD" "VR" | exact (no space, with quotations) | Vive AMD vr | PASS

*actual example taken from the Reddit post that motivated coding this script:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/3j3x7f/amd_and_vr/cum1g30

Intro:
Google's boolean search syntax is the simplest yet most effective tool anyone can use to master search and efficiently get exactly what they want. I am in the habit of using exact boolean searches daily, for practically every search I make and I believe everyone should be using it. See 'Why was this created?' below for more details.

Problem:
By default, the Google Search engine guesses and 'dumbs down' what you type, changing your words to other similar words, like a spellchecker, based on popularity. While useful in some cases, this produces lots of results that distract the majority of users as they open page after page, but this method often has very little to do with what you really want.

Solution:
All you have to do is put your word(s), exactly as you want them to appear, "in between quotation marks".
To do the opposite, for the things you don't want appearing, put a minus sign (-) in -front.
So basically, it's just: "include", -exclude
This will make it so you can specify which term(s) must appear on a page in order to qualify as a search result or "hit".
Pretty simple.

Why was this created?
This script was an attempt to make a tiny script I wrote 'Google Autoquote', in a program called AutoHotkey, available to everyone. It was written after Google took away the plus sign, as the inclusive boolean mark, to reserve it for their Google Plus project. They replaced it with the quotation mark syntax which was inferior and so I wrote this utility script. It has become so useful and ubiquitous that I can't imagine using Google without it any more. For what it's worth, I think they should teach Advanced Internet Search Techniques in school, like reading/writing/logic, it's a meta-tool key that lets you learn everything else.

nQuote Firefox addon I wrote:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nquote/

About:
In the use of Google's boolean syntax ("include", -exclude), this is a utility script that relieves some of the repetitive strain involved in tediously positioning the cursor when placing quotation marks at the start and end of search terms. This script will also work on Youtube, as it is runs on Google and uses the same syntax (quotations) for exact search.

Search on the internet can be a needle in the haystack proposition. Using exact boolean methods ("include", -exclude) to dictate which terms are required to show up in every result can greatly reduce the number of hits you will have to look through.

Note about letter/small word selection:
This script should work 99% of the time, but isn't perfect. I know from testing that if a single letter or very small group of letters are highlight-selected and NumpadAdd key is pressed, the first occurrence of the letter(s) in the search box will be encased in quotations rather than the original selection (example, 'scathing cat', selecting 'cat' + NumpadAdd = 's"cat"hing cat'). This shouldn't be a problem however, since users are most likely to want atypical, unusual, unique types of words which shouldn't fall under this narrow behavior case and even if not, users can manually encase 'cat' in quotations.