Slashdot Mirror
Google Raises Word Limit
Philipp Lenssen writes "Google quietly raised their web search limit to 32 words. Previously, only up to 10 words were allowed per query, with succeeding words being ignored. This is not only important to specific approaches of advanced searching (for example, when you need to exclude many different keywords using the minus operator), but it's also of great help to certain tools using the Google API. While there doesn't seem to be any official statement from Google yet, some more details can be found at my Google blog."
The problem with getting good search results are synonyms (different words that mean the same thing) and homonyms (the same word that means different things). With the 32 word limit, you can avoid both of these problems by following a few simple steps- Let's say, for instance, that you live in new york city and are looking for a moving company that specializes in fragile antiques... typically, the vagueness of such a query makes it hard to find good results, but not if you follow these steps:
1. Break your search into 2-4 principal, independent concepts- In my example, the concepts are NYC (the location) moving company (the company type) and antiques (the specialty)
2. For each concept, come up with as many terms as you can that are descriptions or examples of the concept that are very specific and won't trigger homonyms- For instance, you wouldn't want to use the word "New York" because it is too vague and could refer to the state (a company in Albany, NY won't help you). However, "NYC" "Long Island" "Brooklyn" "Queens" "New York City" are great, even if they seem overly specific- You just need one of them to cause a hit on a relevant page.
3. Put parenthesis around the terms for each concept (be sure to put quotes around each compound term) and OR together the items inside parentheses.
This is what the entire search might look like:
("NYC" OR "Long Island" OR "Brooklyn" OR "Queens" OR "Manhattan" OR "Bronx" OR "New York City" OR "Big Apple") ("moving company" OR "moving companies" OR "specialy movers" OR "professional movers" OR "u-haul" OR "apartment movers") ("fragile" OR "antiques" OR "china" OR "difficult to move")
It takes a bit of time to put together (and google will run slooooow because this kind of logic is very difficult for the search engine), but a search like this will give you the best possible results on hard queries.
The "*" character, used as a wildcard in Google, doesn't count as a word. So even previously, you could search for quotes and replace certain words with * to fit the entire thing.