Actually, the “mathematics” and the “punctuation” are a perfectly legitimate, if somewhat antiquated, form of search. More or less.

Putting + in a search means “and” - i.e. find pages that contain ALL of these words (rather than just some of them). This sort of search was more common before Google raised the bar for making search engines more intuitive; in the days when Yahoo was “it,” searches using + were pretty common.

Quotation marks are used to try to find exact phrases -

“brown galoshes”

is a more specific search than

brown galoshes

It’s particularly useful if you’re searching for lyrics and you have no clue who sang the song or what it’s called, but you can recall that there’s a lyric that goes “someday when your head is much lighter.”

Said person who did the wakiki couch search seems not to quite understand the use of quotation marks (hence using them around single words), but does understand the use of the + sign in a search-engine search.

And who doesn’t need a picture of a couch on a balcony in waikiki? Sounds pretty soothing to me. I can feel myself relaxing just thinking about it…