How to Google for --depend?

Question

The latest makefiles we've received from a third party vendor contain rules with --depend on the end of build rules, so I thought I would look it up on Google, but try as I might, I can't persuade it to display any pages with exactly the characters --depend

I've tried surrounding it with quotes "--depend": I've tried the Advanced Search: I've tried backslashes "\-\-depend" in the (vain) hope that there is some sort of unpublished regular expression search available.

Am I missing something blindingly obvious?

Please note that this is NOT a question about what --depend does, I know that, it's a question about how you Google for very precise, programmer oriented, text.

Answer 1

I remember to have read somewhere that google's web search does not index non alphanumeric characters, treating them as word separators, so that's not possible.

Answer 2

I had the same issue searching for 'syntax-rules'. You would think they would have solved this by now.

Answer 3

You can specifiy literal symbols in a Google Code Search but not Google Web Search.

Examples;

Google Code Search for +"--depend"

Google Web Search for +"--depend"

Answer 4

Reason for this problem is that a minus sign at the start of a token indicates that you want to EXCLUDE it from the search.

This is how you can filter out really popular results that really have nothing to do with you want.

For example, try searching for "wow". Then try searching for "wow -warcraft".