Why Use the + When Searching on the Internet?   2/21/2008 - 766 views,

The answer is, you should use the “+” when searching on the Internet to avoid wasting your own time - to find that thing for which you are searching much more efficiently, and without having to wade through as many false listings, link farms (those annoying websites that are full of nothing but ads and that seem to be created just to trick you into coming there - and that’s because they are), and bogus sites.

And don’t you just hate it when you search for something, go to a resulting site, and find that the search then tells you “These terms only appear in links pointing to this page”?

Using the plus symbol will almost (not entirely, but almost) eliminate that.

Using the + sign when searching does this: it tells the search engine that whatever it finds for you must include the term to which the plus symbol is pre-pended. So, for example, using the term “+cats” instead of “cats” tells the search engine that the results must include the term cats - to ignore all pages that do not have the term “cats”.

Now, all this said, as the Internet search engines are getting more sophisticated, you may find that the results you want turn up just fine without using the + sign. In fact, for some search engines, the plus sign no longer makes that much of a difference.

But for some search engines it still does. And it never hurts to add it when a term is really important to you. Using the + sign tells the search engine “and I really mean it”.