For our search tools, we primarily rely on the free Web search engines, and they have proven remarkably useful at tracking down information located on one of the hundreds of millions of Web pages scattered around world. It has been fascinating, and sometimes frustrating, to watch the constant development and change of the search engines. We have learned how to use these new tools, identified the advanced search features, and have become power searchers using Boolean operators, field searching, limits, and date sorting. But, in the process, we have also noticed some strange occurrences. The search engines do not always behave as expected.
Records appear containing the terms that had been excluded with a minus sign.
Early in the development of the search engines, these strange behaviors could be excused as growing pains. Now that most of the search engines have had a few years to mature, to tighten up their programming, and to fix reported bugs, we might hope for more consistent processing. Unfortunately, we hope in vain. If anything, there seem to be even more frequent errors, inconsistencies, unexplained behaviors, and other peculiarities with the search engines this year than in the past. New search engines continue to emerge.