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."

Comments

Great

[lastninja]

Now you can search for quotes, without having to strip half of the words away. Just cut and paste it in to the browser. I guess this will also make it easier to search for source-code, as it is now you will likely end up at a documentation - site. When you want is some sourcefile from some Sourceforge project.

very complex

[St. Arbirix]

32 word searching increases the complexity of the search many times over. For a ten word search you're usually talking about finding all documents with all ten words, ordering them by how many of the searched terms were found, and then by their linked-to values. With 32 you're finding ~3.2x as many documents, comparing for 3.2x as many words in each documents, and then finding how popular they were.

So, um, wow.

Matching MSN Search?

[Utopia]

Looks like the limit was raised to match
MSN's new search whih has has sported a bigger word limit for quite some time.

Good for searching multiple sites

[prostoalex]

I discovered how to make a Firefox plugin for limiting Google searches to select few sites, but the problem before was that each site:domainname.com directive was treated as a term. So if you wanted to search 7 sites at once, then google would let you enter maximum of 3 keywords to span that search across multiple sites. So this keywords increase, you can do stuff like 5-word searches across 10 domain names, for example.