Minus symbol no longer excludes that word in bing searches

Question

Why did Microsoft change bing so that putting a minus symbol in front of a word would exclude that word from the search. This was a great tool to help bing produce more accurate results. Now I get results that contain very little useful information.

Answer 1

Hi Bil,

Minus is a standard industry practice, I think Microsoft won't take it away. It is possible that they might have an ongoing bug.

It is working fine for me as I see though. Please click Feedback to let Microsoft know - they would email you once it is fixed.

I hope this information helps. If you have any more questions, don't hesitate to reach out.

Otherwise, please take a moment to rate the answer. Wishing you good luck!

Answer 2

Bing still supports the minus sign (-) as an exclusion operator, but it must be used according to Bing’s documented advanced search rules.

According to the advanced search options:

• NOT or – excludes webpages that contain a term or phrase.
• These operators must be capitalized when using the word form (NOT), otherwise they are treated as normal words (“stop words”) and ignored.
• Only the first 10 terms in a query are used, and operator precedence matters, especially when combining OR with other operators.

To reliably exclude terms now:

1. Use -word directly before the term to exclude it, for example:
   cats -dogs
2. When combining with other operators, group terms with parentheses so exclusion is applied as intended, for example:
   (cats OR kittens) -dogs
3. If using the word form, ensure NOT is capitalized, for example:
   cats NOT dogs

If results still look noisy, refine further using the documented operators ("", (), AND, OR, +) so Bing’s ranking and relevance logic can better match the intended query.

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References:

• Advanced search options
• How Bing delivers search results