It only rarely happens, but once or twice I've found it desirable to be able to search the web for a set of search terms that includes a negative number. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any obvious way to do this.
Simply including the number, e.g. -9 in the search terms will cause Google to exclude all results containing the number 9, since it treats - as an exclusion operator. Alone, a search for -9 returns nothing.
Similarly, enclosing it in quotes "-9" returns results for 9, not -9. But I need to disambiguate them: in my particular search, results including 9 are useless while I actually need results for -9.
A note on Google's own product forums indicates that even Google's own employees don't know how, or if, this can be done.
Is it even possible to do this at all?