Exclude a term from Bing VIDEO search

Question

Exclude a term from Bing VIDEO search

Slick RCBD 116

I recently was trying to remember how something in the ummodded version of Silent Hunter III worked (and glancing at the manual didn't help), but most videos shown with Youtube, Google, or Bing search have the popular GWX mod or successor being used.

Reinstalling it on my system would be a PITA due to the unsupported DRM on the CD (or was it DVD? I forgot) and then having to switch back to using the mods.

However when I do a Bing Video search for "Silent Hunter III" or "Let's Play Silent Hunter III", I get tons of videos with the GWX mods.

If I try the minus sign with "Silent Hunter III -GWX", I get nothing but GWX mods as if it interprets that as "must include GWX". "Silent Hunter III NOT(GWX)" and "Silent Hunter III !GWX" are just as bad.

How would I find a play-through of vanilla? I used to be good a boolean searches 20 years ago, but lately the search engines seem to depreciating them and I don't know how to filter out the unwanted stuff. Amazon's search is just as bad if not worse. If it were not one of the only places I can actually redeem the points my credit card gives me I'd stop using Amazon entirely.

SH3 is just one convenient example. There are other searches where I want to exclude stuff. So how would I do it?

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2 answers

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Answer 1

Slick RCBD 116

Well, as you can see putting in "silent hunter III -gwx" produces nothing but GWX videos.

SH3GWX

Note that I specifically said Bing VIDEO search, not "all". The "all" usually honors the minus sign.

Emma1-N 13,595 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2026-08-14T07:25:42.4933333+00:00
Hello Slick RCBD,

At this point, there does not appear to be a way to force Bing Video Search to respect the -GWX exclusion when it ignores the operator. As a workaround, try adding positive keywords such as:

"Silent Hunter III" "vanilla"

"Silent Hunter III" "unmodded"

"Silent Hunter III" "original campaign"

You can also try running the search under All first, where the exclusion operator may work more reliably, and then open the video results from there.

If Bing Video Search continues to return results containing the excluded term, I recommend using the Feedback Hub, as your feedback will be sent directly to the appropriate Microsoft team responsible for Bing Search, helping them investigate and improve this behavior in future updates.

Answer 2

Welcome Slick RCBD,

Thank you for reaching out to Microsoft Q&A forum.

According to Microsoft's documentation, Bing still supports exclusion operators:

-term or NOT term should exclude results containing that term.
NOT must be capitalized when used as a word operator.
Parentheses can be used for grouping terms in more complex searches.

For example: "Silent Hunter III" -GWX "Silent Hunter III" NOT GWX are the documented ways to exclude "GWX" from the results.

However, there have been multiple recent reports from Bing users stating that exclusion operators are not always being honored correctly in practice, even when the query is written according to Microsoft's documented syntax.

Minus symbol no longer excludes that word in bing searches - Microsoft Q&A

Exclude terms from Bing search - Microsoft Q&A

Bing Search Operators Not Functioning Corrrectly - Microsoft Q&A

As a workaround, you may get better results by combining exact phrases and additional positive keywords, for example:

"Silent Hunter III" "vanilla"

"Silent Hunter III" "unmodded"

"Let's Play" "Silent Hunter III" "original"

Microsoft's official advanced search operator documentation can be found here: Advanced search options | Microsoft Support

If Bing continues returning GWX results despite using the documented exclusion operators, I would recommend submitting feedback through the Feedback option available on Bing so you feedback will be reaching to the right team, the team can investigate the search behavior.

Thank you for your understanding.