What is a Search Operator?
A search operator is a feature found in search engines that let you type a text query to search for something, which allows you to control the behavior of the search engine by typing text codes parsed specially by the search engine program. For example, on Google, normally typing a word just searches for that term, but if you type a minus symbol (-) before the word, Google will instead return only results that do NOT include that word, e.g. dogs -poodles would search for webpages containing the term "dogs," except those containing the term "poodles."