88Pro Thinking

This is a Google Hack I posted at http://hacks.oreilly.com which I am reposting here since I messed up the formatting in my original post :-)

When there are common words like [from, to, on,…] in your search text Google says those words were not included in the search? Does that mean those words won't affect the final search results?


Search for [Pictures from Jaffna] in Google and you will notice that the result excludes the word [from] in the search. Google explicitly says that "from" is a very common word and was not included in your search". This misleads people to think that even if they don't include the word [from] or any other common words in the search text, the search results will be the same as the case where we purposely include it. The [Pictures from Jaffna] search returns www.senthoor.com as the first result.


However if you search for [Pictures Jaffna] excluding the word [from] the results returned by Google are different. This time the first result is Jaffna, Sri Lanka, pictures. This raises the real question whether Google really omits the common words from its search??? Therefore, in my opinion it is better off, including some of the common words in your next search, even if Google says its those words are not included in your search.


By the time you check these search text the order of the results might have changed. However you can try out with your own search text to verify whether information presented here still holds true.


See also:
http://www.google.com/help/basics.html#stopwords

posted by 88Pro / Wednesday, December 17, 2003