Robert_Charlton - 7:57 am on Feb 15, 2012 (gmt 0)

What's wrong with pure text match btw? Why change something that is working?

ergophobe beat me to it... but we haven't seen pure text match for many, many years. With the huge number pages now in Google, even without the ambiguities of words, pure text match wouldn't scale.

Think "phrase-based indexing refined by user satisfaction and AI."

...natural language searches with articles and pronouns and so forth.... ...I didn't have the word "port" and my first old-style keyword search failed. So I fell back on what I consider my new strategy. I typed in my query as if I were talking to a human mechanic and typed in "Where do I plug an OBD reader into a Subaru Forester?" Yes, of course I know half of those are stop words, but guess what? An appropriate page, with a diagram and everything, popped up #1.

For a number of different reasons over the last several months, I have been running test searches in various niches, leaving out all but one or two of the target keywords in a long tail query, but including peripheral vocabulary to describe the situation, and I've also been getting some surprisingly appropriate results.