Google Now Allows More Than 10 Words Per Query

[werty]

This is pretty cool, and I did not see anyone post this yet:

I know that we are not supposed to post links to search results but check it out:13 words in the query [google.com]

This will be great for some types of research.

[Brett_Tabke]

> Any idea on what percentage of the searching
> public do more then 8 keywords?

We get over 400 searches hitting here per day that have 9+ kw's. That is significant. Also note, that you would also get the entire search string: we get over 100 searches per day that are more than 20 keywords.

> I've been doing this with Google for
> quite some time.

They would cut it off at 10 words. You may also have had stop words in there.

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More than 10words - opens a new world of the referral spam game?

[tforcram]

I'm not sure if this is correct, but it makes sense if you think about how you would implement a search. If you were to put quotes around something, no matter if its two words or two thousand words it would be counted as one, it in essence becomes the keyword, because anything it matches has to match exactly. It really isn't that hard to match one keyword which is why there probably isn't a significant limit on quoted lines. But when you add in that several keywords that could show up in any order in the document, then it gets complicated. I haven't tried this, but I bet if you tried putting in 33 sentences in quotes it would give you the same message as 33 words.

edit: I just tried it with the two words in quotes and yes it gave exactly the same warning. It even said words instead of phrases or something else.

[Powdork]

But when you put more than 32 words in one set of quotes you also get the notice.

[atadams]

Great news! I frequently ran up against the 10 word limit, especially with complex logical searches.

[Brett_Tabke]

"...any subsequent words) was ignored because we limit queries to 32 words."

[sun818]

It doesn't matter if you have words in quotes or not, the hard limit is 32 words. If you are searching on a phrase with three words in it, the search will count as three words toward the 32 word limit. This includes any filter syntax like site:, link:, inanchor:, etc.

[BReflection]

/me wonders what the limit on nesting is, if any
this search [google.com] has about 430 nests. seems to be limited by the highest number they can calculate.

[sun818]

Calculator doesn't work since the nested numbers are not closed with within the 32 word limit:

"3" (and any subsequent words) was ignored because we limit queries to 32 words.

[Alpacaherder]

This is great news. I was running into the 10-word limit all the time when trying to do searches of multiple sites using OR to see if one site out of a list I had in mind contained the keyword. I also welcome it so that I can do longer duplicate-content searches. (We check the sites of link buyers to make sure they're not copying anyone's content before we sell them links.)

[Robert Charlton]

Pardon my ignorance, but is this the type of thing that could be enabled by a switch to 64-bit architecture?

I'm a little late to this thread, but this is the question I'm finding most interesting.

[BReflection]

Pardon my ignorance, but is this the type of thing that could be enabled by a switch to 64-bit architecture?
...
I'm a little late to this thread, but this is the question I'm finding most interesting.

They haven't switched to a 64 bit architecture.

2,147,483,647 is the 32 bit limit.

This url is formed to search within the results for the letter a. I have instructed it to display 2,147,483,646 results, one below the 32 bit integer limit:

http://www.google.com/swr?q=a&swrnum=2147483646 [google.com]

Then consider this url:

http://www.google.com/swr?q=a&swrnum=9999999999999999999999 [google.com]

Notice the limit is 2,147,483,647

I came up with this the last time there was a bunch of speculation, which was when they boosted their index to 8,058,044,651 pages. I don't see any benefit for Google to switch anyway; they run on, and are designed to run on, commodity hardware. I suppose its possible that this is a hard-coded software limit, a relic of the ghost of Google past; doesn't seem likely to me.