A quick test to see which search-engines still respect the – minus sign, commonly used to exclude search results containing an unwanted word. And are thus useful for proper research search.

Test query: Tolkien 2023 -calendar

Tested: Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google Search, Google Scholar, Carrot2, eTools, Amazon.uk, YouTube, Yandex, Listen Notes (podcast search), Amazon, Internet Archive (“text contents”), Yahoo Search.

Results: The following still respect the minus sign:

* Google Search.

* Carrot2.

* eTools.

* Google Scholar (though there’s strange behaviour with this search – only two rather random results and a link to “see all”).

* YouTube, but only if you do it as…

Tolkien 2023 NOT -calendar

All the others failed. Yandex is unusable these days due to constant complex captchas, so couldn’t be tested. Amazon.uk doesn’t respect the – sign either, and lack of filters make it impossible (for instance) to remove all large-size headphones that use the infernal bluetooth for wireless connection.