full regex support sounds incredible, but is probably pretty damn hard to do now with the scale to which the internet has grown.

Google does provide regex search of the Chrome codebase:

https://source.chromium.org/chromium

For example, if you are interested in knowing how people typically tag raw strings in c++:

https://source.chromium.org/search?q=r%5C%22%5Cw%2B%5C(&sq=&...

Disclosure: I work at Google.

You're probably right, but our servers have greater capacity and capabilities than ever and in a lot of ways, the web is a whole lot smaller than it used to be. Most people have a handful of sites they regularly visit and they only occasionally stray outside the confines of social media. Reddit alone caused the death of countless forums and online communities. Most of the search results we see today are just useless spam. Once you strip out the ads, the massive amounts of JS and the CSS the text you're left with should be easily compressible and quick to parse. The actual content people care about is more centralized and standardized than it's ever been. That has to count for something.

What you mean by minus operator? If one that exclude word from search results, you're wrong https://imgur.com/a/mOYUGsG

Yup. Those work as intended with DDG:

    hacker news -site:ycombinator.com
    office -microsoft
    picard -"star trek"
    japanese fish and rice -sushi

heh, not only was: 'office -microsoft' filled with microsoft links but when i tried 'office -microsoft -site:microsoft.com' all I got was a blank page!

I'll give them some credit though, using duckduckgo.com I only got a page full of Microsoft that shouldn't have been there. It looks like it's https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/ that has the blank page problem

Are you talking about duckduckgo? I tried `office -microsoft` just now and got the expected results: tv series, tv series podcast, government sites, bunch of businesses named Office. Nothing about Microsoft Office.

Huh, it's showing Microsoft stuff for me:

https://i.imgur.com/jrNw5LX.png

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=office+-microsoft&t=h_&ia=web

Interesting. I clicked your second link and I still got the results respecting the negative operator I mentioned in my post above.

Edit: To confirm, `office` alone returns a page full of Microsoft results.

If anyone from DuckDuckGo is lurking by any chance, I'd love to hear what makes it different.

I have these same results. Maybe there's an active A/B test where one bucket has a working search engine.

Yeah. For a site that claims to help people escape the filter bubble this seems like evidence that they don't. Maybe it's your location, or your typical searches that are giving you better results, but duckduckgo fails that test for me every time.

I'm sorry but that behaviour is very, very flaky in Duckduckgo and breaks for me regularly.

Filtering retailers out of search results in Duckduckgo can be very difficult because of it.

An trivial example that springs to mind recently was trying to search for information on the manufacturer of Hycosan Extra eye drops.

The results are swamped by ecommerce sites with no actual information on them. Adding terms like "-pharmacist" or "-retailer" actually boosts sites with pharmacist in their URL to the top of the results.

I sometimes have the same issue searching for programming topics where the results are swamped by Microsoft related tech. That would be fine if that's what I was searching for but when it's not it's a real pain in the arse. Using "-microsoft" or some other exclusion just boosts the incorrect results from Microsoft's own site even further.

Sometimes Duckduckgo fix this behaviour but it seems to break randomly for me.

I've also found DDG ignore quotes often too.