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A quick guide to make Google search exclude multiple words or specific phrases for better results
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Is the Google search results page not showing you what you need? Since Google is so vast, the search engine can have trouble understanding your exact needs without a little help. Luckily, it'll just take a few symbols and phrases to get your Google search to yield better and more refined results. This wikiHow will show you how to exclude a word, term, or website from the Google search engine.
Things You Should Know
- Use a minus sign to exclude a word. For example, search: best laptops -HP.
- Use a minus sign and quotations to exclude a phrase. Search: best laptops -"budget laptops".
- If using the minus sign doesn't exclude a word or phrase from the results, try the advanced search form or exclude additional words.
Steps
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Use the Advanced Search form . Many Google users report that the using the minus/hyphen symbol to exclude words and phrases doesn't work as reliably as it used to. If you're unable to exclude certain words from your search, go to https://www.google.com/advanced_search . Here, you can enter your search terms, and enter your exclusion(s) into the "none of these words" field for better results. -
Try excluding additional words. If you're trying to exclude a word that's in most or all of the results, Google may ignore the modifier. Google also may show you results containing a variation of the excluded word, such as misspellings or pluralizations. You can i improve your results by excluding even more words or concepts, and adding more keywords to your query.- For example, if you're searching for the emotion "euphoria" but don't want to see results about the TV show Euphoria , you'll still see results about the show using euphoria -tv . In this case, a search like euphoria emotion -tv or euphoria -tv -series would yield better results.
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Make sure you're not searching the Shopping page. The - modifier doesn't work on the Google Shopping page. As of now, there's no way to exclude specific words and phrases when searching Google's Shopping tab.
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