untangling_the_web

DOCID: 4046925
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Beyond the use of the OR operator in its simple search, Google does not support
. boolean search.
While Google assumes that multiple keywords are a phrase, searchers can
delimit phrases using double-quotes. For example, if I search on:
[the last king of france]
without double-quotes, Google will ignore the "the" and the "of' in its search. The
results I get include many irrelevant hits, such as music from a group called ''The
Last King" and an article about Lance Armstrong. However, if I enclose the same
query in double-quotes, Google will search on exactly the phrase ["the last king of
france"], and return a result with the name of the last king of France. Enclosing
searches in double-quotes is much more effective for finding precise results than
relying on automatic phrase searching.
Google no longer routinely ignores stop words outside double quotes. Each of
these searches will now return different results:
[the last king of france] [last king france] ["the last king of france"]
Stop words are English words that are so commonplace they are not included in a
search unless the searcher forces Google to do so. The stop words Google
recognizes include: a, an, about, and, are, as, at, be, by, com, from, how, I, in, is, it,
of, on, or, that, the, this, to, we, what, when, where, which, with, why. There probably
are others!
However, Google's handling of stop words is inconsistent. For example, in the query
[to be or not to be], Google ignores OR because it may be a logical operator, and it
also appears to ignore TO and BE, only searching for NOT. Therefore, you may
need to force Google to search for a stop word on occasion. There is a Google hack
for forcing Google to search for stop words.
It is unnecessary to use the plus sign (+) with any terms except stop words because
by default Google searches for all keywords. However, there are many times when
searchers need to exclude certain terms that are commonly associated with a
keyword but irrelevant to their search. That's where the minus sign (-) comes in.
Using the minus sign in front of a keyword ensures that Google excludes that term
from the search. For example, the results for the search ["pearl harbor" -movie] are
very different from the results for ["pearl harbor"].
Google's handling of words with diacritical marks such as accents or umlauts is
inconsistent. By default, Google will search for terms matching those with and
without the diacritic. As Google's Vanessa Fox explains, "When a searcher enters
a query that includes a word with accented characters, our algorithms consider web
pages that contain versions of that word both with and without the accent. For
52 UNCLASSIFIEDHFOR OFFlOIlItL USE ONLY