[Ads-l] ? Eliminating ? from a Google Book search?

[Ben Zimmer]

On Sun, Mar 19, 2017 at 11:11 AM, Joel Berson <berson at att.net> wrote:

> Can one eliminate quotations containing a question mark from a Google Book
> search?  I want to search for "back answer" without having to scan through
> a haystack of transcripts of interrogations with the text "... back?
> Answer:"
>

Punctuation is stripped out in any Google search query, so you're out of
luck. While scholars would like a more robust search interface for Google
Books, it still works just the same as any other Google search.

(Punctuation is in fact tokenized in the corpus used for the Google Books
Ngram Viewer, but that's no help to you here.)

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