Google search result sites don't contain all search words?

In My Humble Opinion
1

What is up with Google recently? I do a search for “netbios windows file printer sharing” (without the quotes)

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=netbios+windows+file+printer+sharing&aq=f&oq=&aqi=

The second result for me is “NSIT: Technical Tools & Resources” Try and find the word “netbios” on that page. It’s not there. My first search word isn’t even on the second page that Google referred me to.

Ok fine, maybe the page content changed since Google last indexed it. Click on Cached and Google informs you of the following:

These search terms are highlighted: windows file printer sharing **These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: netbios **

Whaa? :confused: I can see where that would occasionally be useful, but not as a primary search default.

Anybody else ran into strangeness from Google lately?

BTW, the fix for that is to put a + before each search word to ensure that it appears on the page. Why that’s necessary now I don’t understand.

2

“netbios” is present in the URL of the second result. I put a “+” in front of netbios and the second result is still the second result.

3

Interesting. That really wouldn’t help my search, but interesting nonetheless.

4

Google uses a complicated system to determine how useful pages like this “NSIT” are likely to be for you, including information they gather from the rest of the web about the source they’re providing. In addition to looking at the content of the NSIT page, Google’s algorithm sees that someone else on the web has linked to that page using the word “netbios” in the hyperlink. Google saw this hyperlink text and assumed that the NSIT page behind that link would be related to netbios even when the page didn’t contain the word itself.

This has sometimes been abused in a process that was called googlebombing. For example, about 5 years ago there was a coordinated effort to link to the whitehouse.gov page for George W Bush using the text “miserable failure” in the hyperlink. Google, seeing many examples of the words miserable failure linking to that particular bio of the president, assumed that people searching for the string “miserable failure” must be looking for the whitehouse.gov page for then-president Bush.

5

I thought it had always been like that, especially since you didn’t use the quotes.

6

Maybe it was just a matter of the keyword appearing the URL. But seems like I’m running afoul of that more and more lately.

7

I’ve had something similar happen on a few occasions in recent months. To use your example, I’d do the search and at the bottom of the page would be a message saying something like “These results pertain to netbios. Click here to see results for netbios windows file printer sharing.”

Um, WTF? The reason I typed in all those words in the first place was because those are the results I wanted to see!