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

I wonder....

[Heftklammerdosierer!]

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

Finnally.

[Phantombantam]

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

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.

Re:Great

[Fryboy]

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.

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.

Re:very complex

[damiangerous]

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

Re:very complex

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

searching for non a-z characters

[fluor2]

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

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.

Re:Good for searching multiple sites

[gl4ss]

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).

How To Use 32 Words To Improve Your Searches...

[smug_lisp_weenie]

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.

Regexp

[John Hasler]

Now, if they will just accept regular expressions.

Re:Regexp

[vladd_rom]

>> 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.

Google API? Useless.

[Guspaz]

"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.