Google makes it easier to search for programming languages answers

By Barry Schwartz

Published: March 2, 2017 at 11:57 am

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Google announced they now let you search using sequences of two or three special characters, something many coders do when looking for programming help in search. So now you can go to Google and search for technical queries such as [== vs ===] and [+=].

Google gave the example, if you’re searching for the meaning of [c++17], you will get results for the well-known programming language instead of c17, which brings up a Boeing airplane.

Here is an example of a search result page for such technical queries:

Google also made it better for organization and product names that include punctuation. So for companies name She++ and Notepad++, Google will now return more accurate results.

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About the author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.