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Try google verbatim. Saves having to put quotes on every word.

What was wrong with '+' as an operator, anyway?

According to Google Drops Plus Sign from Search Operators

It has to do with limiting confusion about the search engine’s social network, Google+.

To Baio, “it seems obvious that they’re paving the way for Google+ profile searches. When Google+ launched ... they coined their own format for mentioning people – adding a plus to the beginning of a name... The fate of the ‘+’ symbol was clear: protect a 12-year-old convention loved by power users, or bring Google+ profile searching to the mainstream? It was doomed from the start.”

One thing Google has perfected is using massive data sets generated from users to improve user experience.

I have to disagree. Google Search keeps changing the rules and doesn't always respect your query elements.

For example, you can read about how Google replaced the plus-sign operator with quotation marks: http://www.seochat.com/c/a/goo...

But what's worse than that: sometimes Google just plain ignores the quotation marks you put in your query. They're supposed to mean that each search result must contain the search term that you've surrounded with quotes. Nope, lately I've been getting a lot of search results that just don't contain the term in quotes.

Help fight against this trend toward dumbed-down search!

Yes, learning how to properly structure queries is vital, but it doesn't help that Google keeps changing the rules and doesn't always respect your query elements.

For example, you can read about how Google replaced the plus-sign operator with quotation marks: http://www.seochat.com/c/a/goo...

But what's worse than that: sometimes Google just plain ignores the quotation marks you put in your query. They're supposed to mean that each search result must contain the search term that you've surrounded with quotes. Nope, lately I've been getting a lot of search results that just don't contain the term in quotes.

Other search capabilities are going away, too. For example, eBay dropped support for wildcard searches... and posted some lame workarounds that just don't get the job done: http://blog.ebay.com/working-a...

Please help fight against this trend toward dumbed-down search!

It's funny how the "law-makers" criticize Google/Yahoo for breaching the rights of its users in China one day while expecting the same to be done in the USA because it is in the public good.

On the other hand it's hypocritical of Google to act like the innocent babe in the woods when they accept similar government interference from counties like China as a "cost of doing business".

This would not be a legal-problem if either, handing user data was the "cost of doing business" in the US, or the US lawmakers applied their values of privacy and individual freedom universally.

There's a few comments which talk about Google stripping the PR like that's the punishment.

The punishment is not the stripping of PR, but being delisted. There are no bmw.de pages in Google. The URL is not in Google.

PR is calculated by an algorithm. It has been reset to 0, but that is because the site has been DE-LISTED. It is 0 now, because the URL is not in Google.

When the site qualifies for reinclusion the site's PR will return to it's normal value. It is calculated by an algorithm on a computer, not a pen, paper and opinion.

Now, the relevance of PageRank.

PageRank is one of many deciding factors used to sort search results by relevancy. It is far from the only one, and if you use something like http://www.seochat.com/?tool=7&option=com_seotools you will see pretty quickly that the PR between results can vary greatly. You are quite likely to see lower-PR pages (or no PR pages) returned in the top 20 results, ahead of higher ones.

For instance, porn:
5 - 5 - 5 - 6 - 5 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 7 - 5 - 5 - 5 - 0 - 0 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 5 - 5 - 0

If PR was truly a critical factor, there would not be 3 pages with PR0 in the first 20 results, and PR5's would not dominate the results.

I'm disappointed that after 10 years Google can't write a spider that DOESN'T identify itself as GoogleBot and confirms that pages match what the spider sees. How hard could it possibly be to setup a few more spiders' whose sole job is to follow the real Googlebots and misidentify their UA to confirm what's been indexed?

...or advertorial? It just seems unlikely that an editor would link to a page that begins "Search engine marketing is critical to the success of your website marketing." That's not editorial - that's a sales pitch.

/bye karma

PS. Here's my free SEO/SEM advice. Visit seochat.com & webmasterworld.com. Then do a search for "seo forum" and participate in some discussion. Another added benefit - you will not limit yourself to a book that will likely be outdated within a year.

Everyone is affected, big or small "publisher".

But I assure you that it hurts when your 100$ Adword budget goes in a puff of probably fraudulents clicks, with nothing you can do about it. The guys at SEO Chat forum are not very happy about this, I assure you.

It's discouraging me of running small-scale Adwords campaigns, honestly.

Google is definitely cracking down on duplicate content. In fact, they've recently patented the concept.

Insert software patent debate (where Google is the default hero due to its geek factor) here...

In the last week, Google did a change to their algorithms which effectively eliminated most of the top-rated businesses from search results.

It has been suggested that they are doing this to force businesses to use Adwords so that their valuation can be increased in the IPO.

What apparently happened was that for any keywords which are actively bid for in Adwords, Google applied a filter making it very hard for legitimate businesses to get any ranking in normal search results.

Here is an application which was built to show the difference between current and previous results (before the new keywords filters were applied by Google) www.scroogle.org/.

This message has some good data and a summary of the argument.

What makes this so worrying is that Google made its reputation on objectively good search results. If they are now distorting results in pursuit of cash, they're LESS objective than search engines which have explicit pay for placement, like Overture: in those search engines you can at least see which results are paid for and which are actually real.

Farewell Google. We hardly knew ye.

I just did a test using the Google Dance Tool from SEOChat.com

Results of Candle truck checked against www., www2., www3., .de, .fr, .ca, .co.uk and .it. All of them have shown the same results. Weird that the ca version is working correctly.

I just did a test using the Google Dance Tool from SEOChat.com

Results of Candle truck checked against www., www2., www3., .de, .fr, .ca, .co.uk and .it. All of them have shown the same results. Weird that the ca version is working correctly.

I just did a test using the Google Dance Tool from SEOChat.com

Results of Candle truck checked against www., www2., www3., .de, .fr, .ca, .co.uk and .it. All of them have shown the same results. Weird that the ca version is working correctly.