Legal Research

Google Syntax Squishyness

Yesterday Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped reported that Google no longer ignores punctuation characters between words.  Thus, a search for low cost will retrieve different results than low-cost.

However, Google’s help still says that they ignore special characters.  This got me thinking about some of the other poorly-documented Google syntax idiosyncrasies I’ve come across:

• Google is not always case-insensitive, even though its help says that capitalization is ignored.  (Here are some examples.)

• If you connect two words with AND, you’ll get different results than if you simply put a space between them.  The help implies that these 2 methods are handled the same way, but I don’t think Google interprets AND as a connector.  Compare implants malpractice with implants AND malpractice.

• Word order matters.  I generally put the most important word first.  (Google buries info about this in the Automatic AND Queries section of its help.)  Compare insanity defense with defense insanity.

• The OR operator must be capitalized, otherwise it is ignored and you wind up with an “and” query.  Google tells you to capitalize OR in the help, but it doesn’t tell you what’ll happen if you don’t.  In the past, Google also included a warning on the results page if you didn’t capitalize OR, but it has been discontinued.  Compare lawyer or attorney with lawyer OR attorney.

I’m sure if I racked my brain I could dig up even more examples.  Google’s algorithm changes constantly.  But if this is news to you, consider attending our hands-on CLE class for more Google tips.

Full post as published by Jenkins Webblits on October 29, 2008 (boomark / email).