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Recently I have stopped using the plus sign in my Google searches.\u00a0 The reason is simple.\u00a0 The same results are given if the search is done without a plus sign.<\/p>\nRecently I have stopped using the plus sign in my Google searches.\u00a0 The reason is simple.\u00a0 The same results are given if the search is done without a plus sign.<\/p>\n
If I search for<\/p>\n
alvin trusty<\/strong><\/p>\n there are 55,000 hits.\u00a0 If I search for<\/p>\n +alvin +trusty<\/strong><\/p>\n there are also 55,000 hits.\u00a0 I imagine the Google database is so big it only makes sense to eliminate links that do not include all terms in the search criteria.<\/p>\n There seem to be some circumstances where the above doesn’t apply.\u00a0 If I search for<\/p>\n alvin trusty education I get the same number of hits… about 20,000.\u00a0 If I use use “edtech” instead of “education” in the above two searches, I get 584 hits and 23 hits respectively.\u00a0 Maybe the obligatory plus sign only kicks in if there are a limited number of hits.\u00a0<\/p>\n Something more is going on.\u00a0 If I do a single word search, I get these numbers<\/p>\n alvin – 17.1 million With the old way of thinking, my search including all three terms should give me a total approaching the sum of these three numbers.\u00a0 I am not sure how Google comes up with 584.<\/p>\n I still use quote marks around important strings of words or letters.\u00a0 Those still work as they always have.\u00a0 The plus sign can also be dropped from the quotes as is seems to be a given there too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Recently I have stopped using the plus sign in my Google searches.\u00a0 The reason is simple.\u00a0 The same results are given if the search is done without a plus sign. If I search for alvin trusty there are 55,000 hits.\u00a0 … Continue reading
\n<\/strong>or
\n+alvin +trusty +education<\/strong><\/p>\n
\ntrusty – 4.7 million
\nedtech – 1.9 million<\/p>\n