GeekSpeak
Google isn't as smart as you think
Posted by nick hoffman on 4/24/2008 8:40:30 AM
In Reply to: re: simple internal search posted by Robert on 4/21/2008 10:30:50 AM
1)

Punctuation - Google simply IGNORES punctuation. whether comma, space, period or whatever. They are treated as "nearly-null" characters. After all, most people can't even spell, let alone punctuate, but Google does admit a general "non-specific-punctuation-character" when matching phrases. Google cheats. For it, quotes are not literal quotes, just text strings to be sampled from...

2) order

A + B = B + A . Commutivity . Elementary (but incredibly sophisticated) mathematics

But A | B is not = B | A . What you ask for first is (appropriately) thought to be more important.

(these days I find that the character "+" is not forceful enough. I still get junk returns that don't include the term(s) I insist on!)

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