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I would like to exclude search results containing numbers in a specific range. My best search term so far was:

foo -1950..2009

Google, however seems to ignore the minus sign and return results with numbers exactly in this range. How can this be done? I have experimented with advanced search, though without success.

The following will not solve the problem:

foo 2010..2012

The reason for this is that the pages that I search for will contain these numbers (for example in date stamps on the page).

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2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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Here is an example search:

foo -1950 -1951 -1952 -1953 -1954 -1955 -1956 -1957 -1958 -1959 -1960 -1961 -1962 -1963 -1964 -1965 -1966 -1967 -1968 -1969 -1970 -1971 -1972 -1973 -1974 -1975 -1976 -1977 -1978 -1979 -1980 -1981 -1982 -1983 -1984 -1985 -1986 -1987 -1988 -1989 -1990 -1991 -1992 -1993 -1994 -1995 -1996 -1997 -1998 -1999 -2000 -2001 -2002 -2003 -2004 -2005 -2006 -2007 -2008 -2009

Currently, the before: and after: operators in Gmail do not work in Google Searches. There is no practical way to negate the range at the moment.

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  • This is the best solution so far, even though I get the following message when I run the query: ""1981" (and any subsequent words) was ignored because we limit queries to 32 words".
    – David
    Commented Jun 9, 2012 at 8:09
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The - operator works only on the following word or phrase. Put a minus sign just before words that you don't want e.g. -rodent, -"Jack Russell". Google search doesn't have the option to ignore a range of value with the - characters.

I think the best you could do is specify ranges except the range you don't want. E.g. - if you wanted to skip the range 1906 to 1999, you could do -

foobar 1900..1905 2000..2005

It's not perfect, but the only method you can follow.

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  • Thank you for your answer. As I mentioned, your suggested method does not work at all. I wonder if there are other search engines that offer such functionality.
    – David
    Commented Jun 7, 2012 at 18:24
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    TBH, you could achieve it with Google if you could add all the numbers you want to avoid one by one. Like foo -1950 -1951 -1952 and so on. I didn't mention it because that's not a feasible solution.
    – Bibhas
    Commented Jun 7, 2012 at 18:42

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