Are a lot of people not in the habit of quoting entire strings?** Not saying one is right and the other is wrong … but I always thought “power users” of search engines regualrly quoted distinct strings. “Oregon mushroom hunting festival” returns exactly one result – this thread.
Been using Google’s search engine for over ten years, have never once used the plus sign in a search. Again, not saying right-vs-wrong … just wondering if plus-sign use is really all that pervasive among Google users. Even “power users” (FWIW, I consider myself a strong searcher).
*** not quoting each individual word, but quoting multi-word strings so that the desired words show up in sequence in all returned results.*
Are you saying that if I search for **red sox **(sans quotes), I will get gazillions of results simply for red?
Even if I did, wouldn’t the red results be way down on page 200,000 or something? And the top few thousand pages be nothing but Boston Red Sox references?
I am trying to think of a case where not having the plus-sign really makes a difference or is difficult to work around … but since I never used the plus-sign, I am coming up empty. No value judgement should be implied … just trying to figure out how the other half apparently has been doing searches.
I was trying to search for “memoria” the other day. Without the plus, 90+% of the results were “memorial” or “memorials.” I didn’t want to say -memorial because that word is obviously relevant to memoria, but I didn’t want it considered in the search, either.
But searching on a string in quotes would not find results such as Oregon Wild Mushroom Hunting Festival. Sometimes a string is not what you want to use.
Thanks for your response, Dr. Drake. Really trying to understand here.
I just ran a search for both:
memoria (~327,000,000 results)
and
“memoria” (~217,000,000 results)
Now, obviously, I couldn’t check each and every result quickly. But over the first several pages of both seaches, each result contained the actual word “memoria” as opposed to falsely hitting on “memorial/memorials”.
So … in a case like this one, what did the plus-sign do for you?
OK … but how does the plus-sign help here? IOW, give these four words:
oregon mushroom hunting festival
… where would the plus-sign go to find “the Oregon Wild Mushroom Hunting Festival” in the result set?
oregon +mushroom hunting festival?
oregon +“mushroom hunting festival”?
Or something else?
(BTW, is that a real festival? I’m trying the suggested searches out to see what happens, and I can’t get a hit for even the string “Oregon Wild Mushroom Hunting Festival”.
One way to (eventually) get **the Oregon Wild Mushroom Hunting Festival **into the results set using only the original four terms – oregon mushroom hunting festival – is to play around with the quotes:
"oregon" "mushroom hunting festival"
"oregon mushroom" "hunting festival"
"oregon mushroom hunting" "festival"
And so forth. I can understand that being tedious and annoying in some more esoteric searches, though. But then, I don’t yet know how the plus-sign saves any effort in a case like this one.
Is this just a glitch in the reported number of results, or is Google somehow finding more results for an AND search than for a default search on the same terms?
I suspect that, without the quotes, Google isn’t so much searching for your terms as it is guessing what you want. So it finds less results because the terms don’t match any common searches. You shouldn’t think of a default search as having anything to do with actually searching for the terms.
What I wonder is whether even the quoted search is really searching for the terms, or if it is just a different type of guess at what you want. There is no way to test it.
When I ran the search without quotes, it returned mostly “memorial” and “memorials”. I tried it again today, and it gives similar results to what you describe. I then tried it with several other similar words, and each time Google only returned the exact results.
This is both a change and an improvement over what it used to do, which is return “fish,” “fishes,” “fishing,” and “fishy” every time you searched for fish. It still bolds the related terms when the search is returned, which is fine.
I guess they’ve been tinkering with their algorithms. I cannot explain it otherwise.
This isn’t a problem. Google omits some results which are either very similar to other results or don’t seem relevant, but gives you the option to include those results if you get to the end and want more.
So I’m sure it found more results for the default search, but also omitted much more so the total reported was less. It would omit less results for the AND search, because if you bother to use an AND search any result with all of the terms is more likely to be relevant.
Apologies if this has been mentioned in the thread before, but Google employee Steve Yegge published an interesting rant about the shortcomings he saw in the Google+ implementation.
I guess it is not a major deal, but having to type
hibbing “dylan” “commerce”
instead of
hibbing +dylan +commerce
is a bit less intuitive to me and changes my search input from broad to narrowing by inserting +'s and -'s, to building from a one word search a term at a time.
So why do we still have the minus (-)? Couldn’t “not” or an open quote do this action?
So … using the plus sign ensured that the subsequent word appeared in the results? So that this search:
+oregon mushroom hunting festival
… would exclude that Mesick Mushroom Festival page?
(I noticed that Mesick Mushroom Festival page and it’s lack of “Oregon”, too. Thankfully, that kind of hiccup has never hindered a search of mine … but I can see how it could)
