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

[Tara Calishain]

>> What is the difference between searching with "~running" and running? Does
>> Google not stem unquoted words?
>>
>
>Sorry, the quotes were just used as meant as delimiters, so:
>~running
>versus
>running
>
>The search for
>running
>returns results that have the exact word, while the search for
>~running
>returns stem results as well: run, runner, runs, etc.  It's the tilde
>that changes the operation.

This is not quite correct. 

While the tilde does do some stemming search, it is used for finding synonyms and similar words. 
(Google seems to already do some "soft matching" -- searching for rose will find roses, etc. -- without
the tilde.) 

For an example of this, do a search for ~ostrich. At this moment the first result actually highlights the word 
emu, which is certainly not a stem of ostrich, but could be considered a similar word since both ostriches and
emu are ratites. 

To get a sense of what's being matched besides the "core word", search for the tilde core word then omit that
word, like this: 

~ostrich -ostrich

When I ran this search I saw lots of results for emu, nothing for ostriches. (Of course, Google may be doing that "soft 
matching" thing again and omitting ostriches because you're omitted ostrich.)

I could talk about Google syntax for hours but I don't want to bore anybody senseless. 

Tara
ResearchBuzz
tara at researchbuzz.com