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Google Raises Word Limit

Posted by timothy on from the 32-is-nearly-the-answer-to-everything dept.

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."

10 of 71 comments (clear)

  1. I wonder.... by Heftklammerdosierer! · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ...what the first 32 word google bomb will be.

  2. Finnally. by Phantombantam · · Score: 3, Insightful

    About time. I always thought of the 10 word limit as gogle's biggest setback.

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  3. Re:very complex by damiangerous · · Score: 4, Insightful

    How are you finding 3.2x as many documents? You should be finding fewer documents, not more.

  4. searching for non a-z characters by fluor2 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    characters like !,.'$ is pretty much not supported by google. i would like those to be included in the future.

  5. Re:very complex by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    False.

    With 32 words you will be able to find theoreticaly almost any page. The difference is much more that 3.2x

    With 10 words - you can search for about <NumberOfWords> ^ 10 ( number of words in power 10 ), but with 32 words - this will be <NumberOfWords> ^ 32.

    Now think about number of words in all languages Google can support.
    There are fewer than a thousand of the world's 6800 languages have writing systems ( http://www.ethnologue.com/language_index.asp )
    Let's assume that all languages has the same number of words as Enlgish one.
    There are less then 1000000 words in English. ( http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/JohnnyLing.sht ml ).
    So - there are assumed less then 1000000*1000 (= 10^9) words in all languages.

    As result - for NumberOfWords ^ 10 there will be about 10^90 possible simple searches (without using + - and/or logic).
    Taking in account our assumption - this is upper boundary for number of possible searches. As well - not all of 1000 writing systems supported by Google.
    This is very close to number 10^100 (googol number - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googol ).

    But with 32 words - upper bound for number of simple searches can explode up to fantastic 10^288.
    This is clearly more then googol number can handle ;-)

    P.S> This math does not pretend to be scientific and correct. Feel free to make research on this subject on your own.

  6. Regexp by John+Hasler · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Now, if they will just accept regular expressions.

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    Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
    1. Re:Regexp by vladd_rom · · Score: 2, Insightful

      >> The biggest problem with search engines is that they return too many answers not too few. [...] What we need is ways to make the answer set smaller, not larger.

      The problem that annoys you is not the size of the answer set, but the lack of a proper sorting function (by relevance) to satisfy you. The fact that you find your desired answer at the 10th or the 30th position is a sign that sorting doesn't work like you'd expect it to. It has nothing to do with the size of the answer set.

      I don't want a smaller answer set, I want a bigger one. As long as the sorting function works like expected, I always want to see the results sorted by relevance, and I want to have a bigger pool of those so that the first one is truly the most relevant.

  7. Google API? Useless. by Guspaz · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "it's also of great help to certain tools using the Google API"

    Hardly. The Google API is limited to 1000 searches per day, making it useless for any sort of web application. About the only thing I can think of that it would be useful for is a desktop program in which the user would only perform a limited number of searches.

  8. Re:Good for searching multiple sites by gl4ss · · Score: 4, Insightful

    though.. it's still not good enough.

    what I would hope for them to introduce would be a word blacklist that would be personal, and that you could include at least a thousand terms in it.

    why? TO AVOID THOSE FUCKING LINKFARMS, they usually have the same advert links in them so just adding the referral id of the owner of a certain farm will get a lot of meaningless sites out of the search. it's doable now if you make your own program that does the filtering(using googleapi. there's two ways, either go to the sites yourself or request the cache from google.. massive traffic in any case for you and the search will take ages to complete).

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  9. Re:very complex by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    The above post is utter nonsense. (insightful?)

    First of all, all Google search words are required to be present on a webpage, so adding more words lowers the number of hits.

    Besides that, the reasoning above is absurd. Why should the number of possible searches correspond to the number of hits?

    And the number of languages in the world is appearing in the equations above? Even when probably 90% of all webpages are written in english?

    Theres nothing interesting about the sheer number of possible searches. After all Goggle only has indexed 8*10^9 webpages.

    PS: By the way - in order to correctly count the possible searches, you should take into account that the order doesnt matter, and divide by the appropriate factor!