How to search for posts that contain "Falcon" but are not about a SpaceX rocket?

Question

The Live Science article Why a microwave-beam experiment will launch aboard the Air Force’s secretive X-37B space plane says:

This time around though, a bit more information is on offer. According to a Space Force statement, the X-37B will carry a "service module" into space with the spaceplane's first payload of scientific experiments. It will deploy a satellite known as FalconSat-8 with some experiments aboard, while PRAM-FX and another experiment will remain attached to the X-37B.

A quick search for the exact match "FalconSat" or "FalconSat-8" doesn't turn up anything but when I loosen the criteria I get hundreds of posts in search result.

Is there some way to search this site for posts that contain the string "Falcon" (upper or lower case) either embedded in a longer term or separated by spaces or a hyphen, but do not contain "Falcon-9" or "Falcon-Heavy"?

I seem to remember a question about an educational military satellite that was called a Falcon of some sort but I'm not sure if I'm mis-remembering something else.

Answer 1

You can exclude certain terms with the - operator, as described in the Help Center. In this case, since the keywords you want to exclude, you have to make them exact matches with ". Searching for

"falcon" -falcon-9 -"falcon-heavy"

gives 133 results; it looks like it returns both posts using the word 'Falcon' on its own, and also 'falcon-1'. (I say looks like since that's highlighted; it could be that the highlighting function works differently than the search itself.)

If this doesn't work, I'm afraid you'll have to resort to the Stack Exchange Data Explorer; luckily, Space.SE is small enough to do a full text search on post bodies. But crafting a decent LIKE clause might be tricky.

Answer 2

You can also remove tags using -[spacex], for instance. Try this query.

Answer 3

You can abandon the largely useless stack exchange search capability and use duckduckgo, which supports the negation operator much better than google.

falcon -spacex -heavy -9 -9s site:space.stackexchange.com works pretty well.