Google glitches?

[Charles C Doyle]

If, instead of enclosing a string of words in quotation marks, one connects the words with hyphens, are the results better?  All I can tell is that the number of "hits" is very different for the two methods of "stringing."

--Charlie

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From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of Dave Wilton [dave at WILTON.NET]
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2012 12:54 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU

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That's part of how Google "helps" you search. Quotation marks in Google,
contrary to what you might think, do not mean a character string search. It
means "give me results that kind of, sort of, approximately match the phrase
I type."

For the vast majority of Google searches, this is genuinely helpful. But it
significantly reduces the search engine's utility for any kind of lexical
research.


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
Joel S. Berson
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2012 12:30 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Google glitches?

I tried searching Google Books with a date range for "entered the * year of
his age" [quoted].  Some of the results highlight "entered into the <Nth>
year of his age".

I would think "into the" would fail my quoted search term.  (It shouldn't be
a consequence of the *, since it's on the other side of the "the".)

Joel

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