[Web4lib] Why use the plus symbol before search terms when googling?

[David Dorman]

To all those who are obsessed with Google:

I was intrigued by the posts concerning the functionality of the + sign and 
the ~ sign in Google searching, especially since most of the posts had no 
citations for their assertions.

So I went to www.google.com and eventually made my way to 
http://www.google.com/help/operators.html
where I found the following:

         Several of the more common operators use punctuation instead of words,
         or do not require a colon. Among these operators are OR, "" (the 
quote operator),
         - (the minus operator), and + (the plus operator). More 
information on these
         types of operators is available on the 
<http://www.google.com/help/basics.html>Basics of Search page.

This lead me to the Basics of Search page, 
http://www.google.com/help/basics.html, where I found the following:


>Google ignores common words and characters such as "where" and "how", as 
>well as certain single digits and single letters, because they tend to 
>slow down your search without improving the results. Google will indicate 
>if a common word has been excluded by displaying details on the results 
>page below the search box.
>
>If a common word is essential to getting the results you want, you can 
>include it by putting a "+" sign in front of it. (Be sure to include a 
>space before the "+" sign.)
>
>Another method for doing this is conducting a phrase search, which simply 
>means putting quotation marks around two or more words. Common words in a 
>phrase search (e.g., "where are you") are included in the search.


This explanation does not refer to Laplante's assertion, so I did an actual 
Google search for variations of "collegial" and got the following "results":

         +collégial      709,000
         collégial       2,820,000
         +collegial      1,980,000
         collegial       2,120,000
         +COLLEGIAL      1,980,000
         COLLEGIAL       2,120,000
         +Collegial      2,130,000
         +Collégial      712,000
         +ColléGIAL      712,000

What ever is going on, the results do not seem to be consistent with 
Laplante's assertion that

>With the plus sign, you tell Google to search "exactly" this sequence of
> > letters (even a sensitivity on uppercase-lowercase).

And in fact, Google also states on this page that:

>Google searches are NOT case sensitive. All letters, regardless of how you 
>type them, will be understood as lower case. For example, searches for 
>george washington, George Washington, and gEoRgE wAsHiNgToN will all 
>return the same results.

Moving on to the ~, I found an explanation on the Google web site 
concerning the use of this symbol at 
http://www.google.com/help/refinesearch.html:

>If you want to search not only for your search term but also for its 
>synonyms, place the tilde sign ("~") immediately in front of your search term.

So while Dunck asserts that the tilde searches stems, Google says that it 
searches synonyms.  I tried the following searches and got the following 
results:

         animal dietary needs    1,710,000, 1,670,000 (searched twice)
         animal ~dietary needs   12,500,000, 12,500,000 (searched twice)
         dietary needs           9,350,000, 8,960,000 (searched twice)
         ~dietary needs  8,960,000, 8,970,000 (searched twice)
         ~dietary ~needs 8,960,000
         dietary                 33,900,000
         ~dietary                121,000,000

In addition to being just plain weird, it difficult to discern any pattern.

I have three observations about all this:

         1.  People who assert things that are verifiable ought to verify 
them and cite their sources.

         2.  It is very difficult to figure out exactly what Google does 
because it is poorly documented and works inconsistently.

         3. You can sure waste a lot of time trying to accurately 
communicate to people how Google works.

         4.  34,600,000 angels can dance on the head of a pin today at this 
time on this pin.

David Dorman

At 02:18 PM 09/07/2005, Jeremy Dunck wrote:
>On 9/7/05, Isabelle Laplante <ilaplante at cdc.qc.ca> wrote:
> > the plus sign is important in languages with accentuated letters.
> > With the plus sign, you tell Google to search "exactly" this sequence of
> > letters (even a sensitivity on uppercase-lowercase).
> > Example in french:
> > +collégial
> > is not the same as
> > +collegial
>
>And the tilde ("~") is for the opposite: search on "running", and
>you'll find just pages with running, but "~running" searches on stems,
>and so matches "runner" as well.
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>Web4lib at webjunction.org
>http://lists.webjunction.org/web4lib/

David Dorman
US Marketing Manager, Index Data
52 Whitman Ave.
West Hartford, Connecticut  06107
dorman at indexdata.com
860-389-1568 or toll free 866-489-1568
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