Google Search

Automatic Exclusion of Common Words

[pageoneresults]

I was doing some research over the holiday weekend and noticed something while performing searches in Google.

If I do a search for companies in wherever, I get a line of text that reads...

"in" is a very common word and was not included in your search.

Now, if I perform the same search without using the word in, i.e. companies wherever, I get a completely different set of results. Even though Google states that the term in is ignored on the first search query, removing it from the phrase returns different SERP's. Can someone explain this to me?

[Macguru]

Proximity.

'gizmo1 +(space)+ gizmo2' does not equal 'gizmo1 + gizmo2'

Wich make me write some weird sentences sometimes.

[Jane_Doe]

I did the exactly the same type of test awhile back and got the same results. I was trying to decide whether or not to include a small, common word in the page name for a new page I was working on.

Google said a word in my search term was ignored, but when I dropped it I got back less relevant results than when I had included it. If I got better results by including the word, then logically it would seem that it wasn't really ingored, was it? Actions speak louder than words.

I even wrote them a note about it a few months ago using their "Disatisified with your search results" form.

[Jane_Doe]

Try:

quotes about cats

compared to:

quotes cats

Google says the word "about" is ignored in the first query, but the top return has the word about in it and the second query doesn't.

[Macguru]

ciml got it pretty well covered here :

[webmasterworld.com...]

[Jane_Doe]

Interesting, Macguru, thanks for the link. I understand what you meant now by proximity.

In my test with quotes about cats, evidently getting returns that actually contained the word "about" was just due to the common usage of that phrase. I got the same results with:

quotes from cats

[Macguru]

My pleasure, and thanks to ciml.

It is sometimes difficult to write sentences that makes sense dealing with this issue.

I find ending a sentence with gizmo1 and beginning the next with gizmo2 is helping in most cases. They read like separated only by a ". " to search engines.

But there is a couple of other tricks that can help too.

[ciml]

> ...ending a sentence with gizmo1 and beginning the next with gizmo2...

Great point Macguru, it's these small things that can let us help Google to understand the subject of the page without resorting to any spammy tactics, IMO.