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The Google-fication of Yahoo!
Hugh Pickens writes "Since coming to Yahoo!, CEO Marissa Mayer has added a weekly, Friday afternoon all-hands meeting, just like at Google; she announced that henceforth the food in Yahoo's URLs Cafe will be free, just like at Google; and she has begun prepping major changes to the layout of the work spaces and buildings of Yahoo to make it feel more collaborative and cool, just like, well.. you get the idea. Such focus on improving cultural issues is an interesting initial move by the neophyte CEO, since the care and feeding and, most of all, cosseting of employees has been a critical element to Google's success at creating an always-sunny work environment. But Mayer has been up to much more serious business, said several sources, especially product innovation as the savior for Yahoo: Better email! Better search! Better ad-serving! And a special plea to make Flickr awesome again! In other words, better every product Yahoo has to offer. 'This is the sound of Yahoo becoming a technology company again,' says one source. 'It will be all about platforms and products.' Sources say that will likely mean a big splashy tech or product deal in the days ahead, perhaps via an acquisition to signal the new direction, perhaps with the acquisition of a sexy product like Flipboard. In the meantime, many at Yahoo are bracing for a pack of current and former Googlers — Mayer had a lot of loyal staffers — to come on board, writes Kara Swisher. 'And, by the looks of all the Googley changes at Yahoo, they'll feel right at home when they get there.'"
I work on web search at Google, and I can assure you that there is no such -req operator. All that you're doing is filtering out results that match the word "req". :-)
When you find a query where you think you need lots of quotes, you might be interested in Verbatim mode, which can be enabled in the left-hand search tools:
http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1734130&topic=1221265&ctx=topic
Here's the official list of supported search operators:
http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=136861
There are also some legacy operators like [inurl:foo], [intitle:foo], and [allintitle: foo bar baz]. http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators.html