How to give priority to a specific term in Google search?

Question

I know that you can add an asterix (*) to use the word as wildcard and you can minus (-) to exclude a word, or quotations (") for an exact phase. But how do you tell the search engine than one word is more important the the others?

For example a search for 'cheap tent hire in Reading' gives you various things to with tents etc. But I'd want to specify that 'hire' is the most important part, to avoid tents for sale etc.

Answer 1

In older versions of Google you used to be able to put a + before a word to indicate that the word MUST be present in EXACTLY that spelling in any results that Google returned.



But apparently Google took that feature away; the + doesn't seem to do that any more, which is a real annoyance.



(By the way, fun fact: The * symbol is asterisk, not asterix; the comic book character is named Asterix as a joke because it sounds like asterisk but many real-life Gaulish rulers had names ending in -rix (from Latin "Rex," king), such as Vercingetorix, who was ultimately defeated by Julius Caesar (and who appears in at least one of the Asterix books as a great leader of the past, from before Asterix's time).

Answer 2

Best answer so far goes to Gigapie for the great Asterix side note.



I know you can put - signs to take off things like sale, but in other examples you may want to giver preference to a word as the most important part of a phrase. I used to think * did this but no.



Surely there is a command to say results MUST include this word?

Answer 3

You can minus a word -sale and [put phrases in quotes



"cheap tent hire" reading -sale

Answer 4

I simply wrote: hire, tent -sale



Only tent rental in various formats came up in huge numbers:

About 7,450,000 results (0.31 seconds)



https://www.google.com/#q=hire%2C+tent+-sale