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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."
About time. I always thought of the 10 word limit as gogle's biggest setback.
42
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.
John Carmack fan, browsing at +5 since 1999.
How are you finding 3.2x as many documents? You should be finding fewer documents, not more.
characters like !,.'$ is pretty much not supported by google. i would like those to be included in the future.
Looks like the limit was raised to match
MSN's new search whih has has sported a bigger word limit for quite some time.
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.
Now, if they will just accept regular expressions.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.