When doing a Google search, to exclude a word in an article the word should be prefaced with what symbol?

• A. Quotation marks
• B. Plus sign
• C. Minus sign
• D. Hash

Answer: (C)

Excluding a word in a Google search is done by putting a minus sign directly in front of the word you want to omit. The minus sign acts as an exclusion operator, telling the search engine to filter out results that contain that term, so you get pages related to your topic without the unwanted word. For example, searching cats -dogs returns results about cats while excluding pages that mention dogs. The other symbols don’t serve this exclusion function: quotation marks lock a phrase to exact words, the plus sign used to indicate inclusion is now largely ignored, and a hash is used for hashtags rather than excluding terms. So prefixing the word with a minus sign is the correct way to exclude it.