Wednesday, November 3, 2010

No Special Characters Allowed With Google

The solution to this problem was to use AltaVista.

Trying to search for "wxALIGN_RIGHT | wxST_NO_AUTORESIZE" was fruitless in Google. No matter how I enclosed it in quotes, it would interpret the '|' as a command to search for either of these terms. Going to advanced search provided previews of how it interpreted my search string, and always showed that it refused to honor my attempts to format this as a complete phrase. Googling other peoples' complaints showed forum threads of people with the same problem, and regretful answers from Google's representatives saying that this kind of search can't be done and will never be possible (mostly people wanted to use '@').