Search Results

The post reflects my current understanding of how Google works. I hope to share extra detail with you as we do more testing or if we hear more from Google Search people. SUMMARY When you write a search string, Google assesses whether it is: Open-ended (assuming you, the user, require assistance) or Specific, or “restrictive.” Google decides on “restrictive” in …

[Edited: apparently, there is an explanation – see Danny Sullivan‘s comments below. Bottom line: if you are a researcher, consider using quotes! My summary.] To Whom It May Concern At Google Search: There is currently a problem with Google search, specifically, quotes. It might be an unintended outcome of How we’re improving search results when you use quotes. We welcome …

If you drag an image into Google’s reverse image search, you now arrive at Google Lens. It (often): identifies an area on your photo that looks like goods for sale and produces “visual matches” (payment links to such goods) on the right. People and faces are ignored. Do you want to dress like your candidate? Use their photo (Someone joked …

It was not the case 10-15 years ago, but now, Google pays attention if you repeat a keyword or a key phrase. Repeating, in theory, should not be necessary; you would expect the same results if Google followed formal Boolean logic and displayed “all” results. However, Google puts some informal “thinking” into the string interpretation, so: If you repeat a …

Until about a week ago, Google provided us with synonyms and variations – “auto-stemming” – of every search term (unless we put it in quotes). It still does, but noticeably less so. Previously, searches like supervisor -supervisor -supervisory -supervisors gave us synonyms for the word “supervisor,” like “manager”. Now the search produces no results. Previously synonyms readily made it to …

Both the Asterisk * and AROUND(X) are proximity operators on Google and provide their own benefits. The Asterisk stands for one word or a few shorter words. “<keyword1> * <keyword2>” will find phrases where the keywords are close together. Example, exploring company email formats: site:rocketreach.co “being used * of the time” Using more Asterisks will find phrases where the keywords …

(Can I please ask you to read to the end?) It has eventually become such a mismatch in terminology. Most people in our industry refer to search strings on Google as “Boolean Strings”. However, the term “Boolean”, meaning AND, OR, and NOT, no longer applies to Google search best practices, and less so every day. Practical Google search strings do …

  Reverse Image Search is a favorite way to find online traces of someone by their social profile photo. But if you search by image on Google, you may be missing some results. Here is why and how to overcome that. #1. When you upload an image, Google (annoyingly) shows its “explanations” – sometimes even offensive – like “hair loss.” …