Change To Google Search With Quotes
May 11th, 2008 by Stephen Cronin (143 views)Following my own advice in my last post, about not sitting on semi exclusive news, I thought I better get this post out quickly! I’m not sure if this has been reported elsewhere, or even how long the change has been in place, but it seems that Google have made a tweak to their Search facility.
It’s only a very minor change, but may be of interest to some…
Background
When you do a search using the quote marks, Google returns only those pages which have that exact phrase on it. For example, if I search for:
some random phrase that I type
it will give me any pages which have all of those words somewhere on the page (or in the URL, or in the meta tags, etc).
When I search for:
“some random phrase that I type”
it will only give me pages which have that exact phrase (ie those words together, exactly as in between the quote marks).
This technique is often used by people researching keywords for use with niche sites, as it lets them know exactly how many other sites have the exact phrase they are targeting. These sites may be their competition!
The Change
As I said above, it’s only a very minor change.
In the past, if I searched for a phrase (using quotes) that didn’t exist, then it returned nothing. I would have received a message that my search didn’t match any documents and some advice on changing my search term so it would find something.
Now, it tells me that there are no results found, but it also returns the results for the search term without the quotes.
An example can be seen below.
Not startling news, just something minor, but a good move by Google.
Loading ...
I noticed this too the other day. Threw me off a little at first, till I got used to it. I’ve noticed some weird results today, when searching with quotes. One phrase I searched for last week had about 20,000 results, and today it had about 750,000. I like the 20,000 a lot better, but I think I’ll keep an eye on this one. Have you ever seen anything like that?
Hi, thanks for the post, but I’m confused.
I thought that the “key word phrase” was a phrase match, and that [key word phrase] was the exact match?
I’ve also been trying to learn negative matches, but it’s so confusing.
I think pretty soon, you’ll just “think of what you want” and Google will turn your computer on, get your credit card out, and buy the item. That would be a “Google Match?” Of course they’d have to take $2 to $22 for the effort, and then ban you if you tried to do the same thing. (No follow da Google)
thanks,
Banner me Boy
It’s the law of big numbers - with billions of daily searches there are probably tens of thousands of searches daily where the exact search brought back no results and the person did not search any more, thereby not giving Google the opportunity for revenue. This seemingly simple change will probably pay for a bunch of engineers salaries.