Whine about Searching with Boolean operators

[Captain Brillo]

Do any current search engines actually still respond to Boolean operators in the search query?

Other than Google's Advanced Search, I can' t find any that work right the way I use them. Once upon a time, it was how you searched for anything on any engine, but now they seem to ignore these terms.
Especially DUCKDUCKGO, which I've had great hopes for, but it's hopeless with AND/NOT/OR/NEAR/+/- none of them seem to work.

So are we condemned to Google (well, maybe StartPage) for complicated searches?
And what happened to the old "Search within these Results", where you could completely change your search and limit it to the last search results?

Searching for anything now is more a long complicated game of "guess how to ask your question" than an effective way to find things. Outright bummer.

[Portreve]

Yeah, duckduckgo is hopeless. I just did an image search for:

car and hatchback not Chevy not blue

And literally the results returned Chevy hatchback cars with mostly blue models. Seriously confused, ddg?

Unlike others (here and elsewhere) I'm not deliberately trying to avoid Google or their products, but I can appreciate the concerns they have which are driving them to find other options, and I can therefore appreciate that Google Search is still not really replaceable for more exotic queries.

[BG405]

Yeah, duckduckgo is hopeless.

If you think that's bad you should try the one on the AdTurds website. Seriously though, it should be basic functionality? I didn't realize it was missing!

I really thought it was just my poor search-fu. It really can be hard to guess the cryptic search terms one must use in order to find relevant results.

[Flemur]

car and hatchback not Chevy not blue

Try
"car" "hatchback" -Chevy -blue