I have quite a few books that I am hoping that libraries will acquire, and every once in a while I search for them. I mostly don't get anything, because many aren't even available as ebooks.
But every once in a while I get a hit, and then my hopes are dashed when it's not the right book. The problem is that then every time after that when I search, the same wrong book is found. Many of these could be excluded if I could add a "not" to the title.
For example, I'm looking for the original
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them by J.K. Rowling that has the descriptions and pictures of the magical creatures. Now, though, it finds
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: The Original Screenplay.
I've also run into it with prolific authors, who have written a book with a very short title and then written other books with similar titles. The James Patterson "Private" series has this issue with
Private Games and
The Games.
Other books I search for sometimes return "study guides" for the real book. This mostly happens with classics, but I'm beginning to see it with more recent books, too.
In all these cases, I can screen them out with a "not this word". Maybe something like the following:
Code:
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them^Screenplay
I know this is tricky, because you'd have to do the "not" after the real search, because no site offers boolean searches, but I think it would be helpful to a lot of people.