All,

Has anyone received any sort of explanation from the Google home office
as to why there is not a search preference which forces Google to
search for words/phrases EXACTLY as they were entered by the user,
i.e. same capitalization, same punctuation?

For example, if you look for the phrase "barley honey", for example,
you also get numerous hits showing other configurations of the search
term, such as

barley, honey
barley. Honey
barley...honey
barley/honey, etc.

In cases where the hitlist reaches into the millions of URLs, i's a
little impractical to go through them all to find the relevant ones.

I have queried Google Support several times, but have never received a
response.


Is there any good reason why Google does not support wildcards (? and
*) in searches? If the search algorithm works in a way similar to the
search functions in many applications, it should be easy enough to
implement. Again, I have asked, but have received no explanation.


Also, does anyone know how Google is able to look inside documents
which are for purchase only (such as DIN standards), and which are not
displayed (except in the form of summaries or abstracts) at the
indicated URLs? Google hitlists of URLs which point to unretrievable
documents have several lines of brief text p***ages to show the search
criteria in context, however when the indicated URL is visited, the
user either cannot view the document at all (without paying for it), or
cannot view the portions of text shown in the hitlist (and containing
the search criteria). If I look for my search criteria on a hit-listed
Web page that contains a "for sale only" document, I usually come up
empty

How is Google able to look inside those texts?

Thanks,

ELC

Ed wrote:
> Has anyone received any sort of explanation from the Google home office
> as to why there is not a search preference which forces Google to
> search for words/phrases EXACTLY as they were entered by the user,
> i.e. same capitalization, same punctuation?

"Google doesn't recognize special characters such as exclamation
points, question marks, or the @ sign. These types of characters are so
common that including them in a search would greatly slow the delivery
of the search results."
http://www.google.com/support/bin/an...=430&topic=359

Tomi Häsä wrote:

> "Google doesn't recognize special characters such as exclamation
> points, question marks, or the @ sign. These types of characters are so
> common that including them in a search would greatly slow the delivery
> of the search results."
> http://www.google.com/support/bin/an...=430&topic=359

Thanks for the Help Center URL, however I would suspect that the
characters "a" through "z" are at least as common as "!" and "?", yet
they are recognized.

As implied in my question, an OPTIONAL "exact search" preference would
be a valuable addition. This does not have to be the default, and in
fact it should not be. But when faced with having to search through
hundreds of thousands of "hits", most of which are not relevant to my
search, I would gladly wait a bit longer for the delivery of exact
matches. If that would take one or two seconds instead of one or two
milliseconds, no problem.

Cheers,

Ed