&quot;Quoted strings always work for me (symbols are still stripped...&quot;<p>That is the definition of not working.  The <i>point of the quotes</i> is to allow searching for literal strings.<p>You have elucidated <i>the entire problem</i>.  Unless, of course, you&#x27;re just searching for movie star names, in which case the rubbery nature of the search results really doesn&#x27;t matter.<p>It appears that -negative searching <i>does</i> work, which is amazing - that&#x27;s nice to know.  But it immediately reminds me of a terrible, glaring problem:  searching for command line switches.  You cannot effectively search for things like:<p>rsync --ignore-existing<p>... since they are interpreted as -negative keywords, even if you quote them.