mfagan - 11:51 am on Mar 3, 2003 (gmt 0)

Google does indeed support parens

That's news to me then. Is there documentation of this somewhere? Search Engine Showdown [searchengineshowdown.com], for instance, says Google doesn't.

Upon trying a few queries, it does seem to work. The typical (word1 ¦ word2) (word3 ¦ word4) at least appears to work perfectly. How long has this been around for?

Perhaps a bug with the google toolbar?

From my experience, the toolbar rearranges your query to put the site: first. It doesn't check for another site:, and it separates strings by spaces, which is why the parentheses get moved around.