How to get google not to treat any characters as special?
October 18, 2008 7:46 AM Subscribe
Is there a way to persuade google (or any other search engine) that none of the characters in your search string is any sort of metacharacter?
I am using the Comodo free firewall, which comes combined with a pretty good intrusion detection system. This just popped up a long list of warnings that an unrecognized program (namely ~.exe) was trying to modify various .sys files in \windows\system32\drivers\. This was suspicious as hell--there was no common theme to what files were targets of the mod attempts; some concerned the Hamachi VPN, some were soundcard related, some were normal MS driver files (ccdecode.sys, flpydisk.sys) and I figured ~.exe was just a little alien looking for a convenient place to lay eggs.
I have Sysinternals' great suite of free utilities installed, and Process Explorer told me that ~.exe was spawned by AcroRd32.exe (Adobe Acrobat reader), so while all of the above was going on I was also trying to search for anyone else who had had any experience with ~.exe and AcroRd32.exe. But I couldn't find any way to make google take the tilde in the search string seriously. All the results were as if I had seached for just exe (EXE Magazine, EXE on wikipedia, discussions of the exe file format, etc.) I tried enclosing ~.exe in quotation marks, and also tried escaping the tilde the *nix way with a leading \. Neither had any effect. I read the google advanced search tips page and the complete list of advanced operators to no avail.
Is there any way to tell google "don't try to be clever, just search for the exact characters I typed"? Or alternatively is there any other search engine that already grasps the concept? Thanks very much for any tips!
P.S. opinions also welcome on whether AcroRd32.exe is compromised (AVG doesn't see anything wrong with any file in the Acrobat executables directory) or whether this is just Adobe messing around with stuff that isn't any of its business (which wouldn't surprise me.)
I am using the Comodo free firewall, which comes combined with a pretty good intrusion detection system. This just popped up a long list of warnings that an unrecognized program (namely ~.exe) was trying to modify various .sys files in \windows\system32\drivers\. This was suspicious as hell--there was no common theme to what files were targets of the mod attempts; some concerned the Hamachi VPN, some were soundcard related, some were normal MS driver files (ccdecode.sys, flpydisk.sys) and I figured ~.exe was just a little alien looking for a convenient place to lay eggs.
I have Sysinternals' great suite of free utilities installed, and Process Explorer told me that ~.exe was spawned by AcroRd32.exe (Adobe Acrobat reader), so while all of the above was going on I was also trying to search for anyone else who had had any experience with ~.exe and AcroRd32.exe. But I couldn't find any way to make google take the tilde in the search string seriously. All the results were as if I had seached for just exe (EXE Magazine, EXE on wikipedia, discussions of the exe file format, etc.) I tried enclosing ~.exe in quotation marks, and also tried escaping the tilde the *nix way with a leading \. Neither had any effect. I read the google advanced search tips page and the complete list of advanced operators to no avail.
Is there any way to tell google "don't try to be clever, just search for the exact characters I typed"? Or alternatively is there any other search engine that already grasps the concept? Thanks very much for any tips!
P.S. opinions also welcome on whether AcroRd32.exe is compromised (AVG doesn't see anything wrong with any file in the Acrobat executables directory) or whether this is just Adobe messing around with stuff that isn't any of its business (which wouldn't surprise me.)
I found a page on the dutch google explaining that they're not indexing occurrences of special characters like @. They say that they occur so many times it would make their index unusable, and they're making an exception for words like C++ and $10.
Here is a google translation of that page.
posted by DreamerFi at 9:51 AM on October 18, 2008 [3 favorites]
Here is a google translation of that page.
posted by DreamerFi at 9:51 AM on October 18, 2008 [3 favorites]
Response by poster: Thanks for the link, that helps very much with the infection itself. So your trick (spelling out the name of the character google insists on treating as a metacharacter) worked because the folks at dynamoo anticipated it and also spelled it out. I'll certainly try that next time I get a search stymied by one of google's little ways. I wonder how common that workaround is. Guess I'll find out. Thanks again!
posted by jfuller at 10:16 AM on October 18, 2008
posted by jfuller at 10:16 AM on October 18, 2008
Response by poster: > I found a page on the dutch google explaining that they're not indexing occurrences of special characters like @.
I wonder - if you are always careful to use online handles that include several characters of that type, does that help keep your online presence under google's radar? Well, too late for me on that one.
posted by jfuller at 10:21 AM on October 18, 2008
I wonder - if you are always careful to use online handles that include several characters of that type, does that help keep your online presence under google's radar? Well, too late for me on that one.
posted by jfuller at 10:21 AM on October 18, 2008
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posted by grouse at 7:56 AM on October 18, 2008