[Corpora-List] Re: problems with Google

Marian Olteanu mou_softwin at yahoo.com
Sat Mar 26 04:16:29 UTC 2005


It looks like Google resumed the support for the wildcard ("*").

"what does mean" returns 13,500 results
"what does * mean" returns 8,260,000 results
"what does * * mean" returns 1,890,000 results

See:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=%22what+does+mean%22&btnG=Search
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=%22what+does+*+mean%22&btnG=Search
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=%22what+does+*+*+mean%22&btnG=Search

--- Pascal Soucy <pascal.soucy.1 at ulaval.ca> wrote:
> Googles does that with all stopwords. If you search for:
>
> what does "the" "the" mean, you'll get the same behavior. Google ignores
> stopwords (and * seems to managed as a stopword).
>
> Both the queries:
>
> what does "*" mean
>
> and
>
> what does "*" "*" mean
>
> results in about the same list of documents. The difference between the two
> occurs in the ranking process. The ranking algorithm likely use term proximity
> so to better match the query as it is written and it keep the position of
> stopwords in the query to do that.
>
> Pascal Soucy
> Coveo
>
> Selon John Milton <lcjohn at ust.hk>, 17.03.2005:
>
> > I just discovered that Google seems to have retained some use of the
> > wildcard for words if you use double quotes with the asterisk. A search
> > for "what does "*" mean" and "what does "*" "*" mean" results MAINLY in
> > any one and two words respectively. If anyone else is using web searches
> > as language learning/teaching resources, this also looks promising:
> > http://www.findforward.com/
> >
> > John Milton
> > Hong Kong University of Science & Technology
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>
>
>
>

Marian
http://www.utdallas.edu/~mgo031000/


		
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