Search Operators Now Hold With AI Search On: +word, -word and Exact Phrases
Type -refurbished into a search box and you expect refurbished results to disappear. With AI search switched on they did not — and on an exclusion they could actually get more common. That is fixed. The +, - and exact-phrase operators now hold exactly the same way whether AI search is on or off, on the hosted search page, the embeddable widget, the API, the Drupal and WordPress plugins, and all five framework packages.
01 What was going wrong
A search with AI on runs two halves at once: a keyword half that matches your words, and a meaning half that matches your intent. + and - are keyword syntax, so they only ever reached the first half. In the default Union mode, the meaning half was free to bring a document straight back after the keyword half had excluded it.
Exclusion had a second, worse problem. The minus sign means nothing to an AI model — it reads words, not arithmetic. Left inside the query, -refurbished was simply one more word describing what you were looking for, so the meaning half moved the results towards refurbished listings rather than away from them.
With AI on, -refurbished removed nothing, and often pushed refurbished listings higher than they would have been without it.
The excluded term is applied to the whole result set and never reaches the AI model at all. Nothing containing it comes back, from either half.
02 The operators
Press the ? button beside the search box to see this list on your own search page.
| Operator | What it does | Example |
|---|---|---|
"word1 word2" | Phrase — those words together, in that order | "machine learning" |
+word | Required — every result must contain it | +laptop 15 inch gaming |
+"word1 word2" | Required phrase | +"13 inch" |
-word | Excluded — drop any result containing it | laptop -refurbished |
-"word1 word2" | Excluded phrase | -"open box" |
They compose in a single query. +laptop +"13 inch" -refurbished returns only 13-inch laptops, and never a refurbished one.
03 Details worth knowing
- A prefixed term is a filter, a bare phrase is not.
+or-in front of a word or a phrase makes it absolute. A phrase on its own —"machine learning"— still guides ranking on the keyword side, so a hybrid search can surface a document that says the same thing in different words. Write+"machine learning"when you need it enforced. - Hyphenated words are safe.
+and-only count at the start of a word, soe-mail,covid-19and1+1are searched for literally. A-inside a quoted phrase belongs to the phrase. - Exact phrases survive. Quotes used to be stripped out of hybrid queries, so a phrase search matched the words separately. It no longer is.
- Facet counts agree with the page. Open Show all on a facet while an exclusion is active and the numbers now match the result count above the results.
- Nothing to configure. It applies to every index, on every surface, with no setting to switch on.
Keyword-only search is untouched — the operators always worked there, and they behave exactly as before.