bill - 7:40 am on Oct 18, 2002 (gmt 0)

Welcome to WebmasterWorld hpche.

The problem I'm finding that search engines match search terms based on spaces between words. <snip> Therefore, you can only really get the most accurate matches if your search term is basically a sentence in itself.

I'm not sure I follow you exactly here hpche, but I know that there aren't spaces in Japanese or Chinese text either, so when searching it is well known to the native searchers that they need to add a space between keywords. Generally I've found that searching for sentences in Japanese comes up with poor results. If I add spaces then engines like Google and AlltheWeb can see where to parse the keywords.

I can still sometimes get reasonable results from Google even so, but it's much less accurate than English language searching and I'm sure it's because of this problem with the spaces.

I'm not sure the spaces are your problem. I get better results with spaces usually. Maybe you could tell us a bit more why this is causing you trouble?