As funny as this is, it's sad that Google doesn't offer something that actually searches for the stuff you enter and doesn't try to guess your intentions or randomly jump to "Did you really mean [...], dumbass?". Kinda like it did several years ago. Heavy use of + used to do that but the new "" replacement is more of a crapshoot.
All you need to do is put quotes around the phrase. Or if you want pages that must contain all the words in any order, place quotes around each word. Or just use Verbatim Search: http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...
I was pleased to learn Verbatim Search no longer requires you to spend several clicks per query to use it, but sad that you cannot set it as a permanent preference.
The reason you can only search for whole words is that it's straightforward to build an inverted index for whole words, but it takes dramatically more storage to make an index to search for arbitrary substrings, since there are exponentially many substrings of each string, most of which you would never want to search for.
My old desktop-based email reader could do it though. I definitely feel like I lost something here. Even just a KEYWORD* search would be an improvement, and that does not require a bigger index.
Most likely it was just doing an unindexed search over the whole thing. This works, but requires a significant amount of resources - both CPU time and IOPS - for people with large amounts of email. It's also slow unless you have only a small amount of email or it's all in memory already. So it's not really feasible for a free, shared service that offers multiple gigabytes of storage space.
How much would you pay to run a custom query against all of Google's index? Sounds interesting. Also, funny, Google spends a bit on creativity and get a large return with publicity every April 1st.
Together with the 8 bit maps, I had quite a chuckle. I really love this page, and I'm a little sad it doesn't function; I guess I won't be seeing any websites with Polka midis.
April fools day aside, this may show why Y-combinator is interested in finding teams working on search startups. The joke is funny because this is what people often want.
They wouldn't allow search this advanced because they fear SEO's would come up with technique to abuse it to their advantage. Otherwise it'd probably been out already.
If this is true I will be taking my news in tautology form from now on.
THIS JUST IN--SCIENTISTS EITHER DID OR DID NOT CONFIRM TODAY THAT PLUTO HAS REGAINED PLANETARY STATUS! WE GO LIVE NOW TO THE MOON WITH MICHAEL JORDAN FOR MORE ON THIS--WAIT--I'M GETTING UNCONFIRMED REPORTS THAT WE MAY ACTUALLY BE TAKING YOU SOMEWHERE ELSE AT DIFFERENT TIME WITH ANOTHER HOST ABOUT AN UNRELATED TOPIC--WAIT--WAIT--I CAN NOW CONFIRM THAT IT MIGHT ALSO BE ONE OF LITERALLY INFINITE POSSIBILITIES, SO STAY TUNED!
