Punctuation skewing results

[snowfox121]

Here are the Google SERPs today for a keyword phrase important to me. Look how much difference there is between what are essentially the same searches. Most Google users using ANY of these searches are looking for exactly the same information.

Christian writers markets #2
Christian writers' market #27
Christian writer's markets #1
Christian writers market #57
Christian writer's market #26
Christian writers' markets #2

Should Google pay this much attention to punctuation and plural forms of words? Doesn't it defeat the user's intentions? i mean, users who really need a specific form of the word (with an apostrophe, for example) could enclose the search term in quotation marks to get an exact match.

[rfgdxm1]

This is just the way Google works. And, possessives and plurals definitely are different things.

[snowfox121]

Of course they are. And of course it's the way Google works. My point is . . . would it be better for the user if it worked differently?

The people using these terms are all looking for the same exact thing. I though Google was all about helping the user find what he wants. A user has absolutely no way to know the best way to query Google does he? He will have to do 6 different searches (perhaps) to find my site--provided he thinks of it, of course. Wouldn't it be a better system to have Google ignore plurals and punctuation unless it was demanded by the user?

[jdMorgan]

snowfox121,

Yes, it would be better. It would also consume a lot more of the search engines' resources. This requires "word-stemming" and is a resource-intensive thing to do. As you demonstrate, almost every word on every page would have to be stemmed, thus greatly increasing the size of the data set.

In order to avoid this, the search engines leave it up to you to creatively include the variants you would like to match on your pages. This saves them resources, and allows you control. Control is also good, even if you don't think it's as good as matching all stemmed variants.

Some engines support word-stemming, and some don't. Unfortunately, Google doesn't. So be clever. :)

Jim

[Dante_Maure]

My point is . . . would it be better for the user if it worked differently?

No. There are too many instances where a plural and possessive do indicate a definitively different goal.

A few examples:

1) Someone looking for "Healing Art" does not want results for "Healing Arts". Then of course you have an entirely different meaning for "Art's Healing".

2) There's a movie called Jason's Lyric.

If Google did as you suggested they would combine searches for the word lyric and lyrics.

Currently a search about the movie Jason's Lyric returns 100% relevant results on page one of Google.

If you do a search for Jason's Lyrics, only 2 out of 10 results are relevant to the movie... and they are still lyrics sites that just happen to have a page about that film's soundtrack.

3) There are countless names that are also common usage words.

You tell me whether the apostrophe makes a difference in the meaning...

Mark's / Marks
Art's / Art
Jack's / Jacks
Scott's / Scotts
Earl's / Earls
Joy's / Joys
Hope's / Hopes
Faith's / Faiths
Grace's/ Graces

These are only a few instances out of hundreds where apostrophes and pluralisation make an enormous difference in meaning.

users who really need a specific form of the word (with an apostrophe, for example) could enclose the search term in quotation marks to get an exact match.

Never happen. The search engines need to try and return the most relevant results for an unquoted term because only a tiny fraction of surfers kow about advanced features such as quotes, +, -, and booleans.

[jackofalltrades]

Plus it would consolidate a lot of already competitive key terms - a lot of web businesses would feel the pinch! :)

JOAT

[rfgdxm1]

Thanks Dante_Maure for taking the time to explain in detail what I didn't have time to do. ;) The problem with snowfox121's example is it just happens to be a specific case where all the variants likely meant the person was looking for the same information. The most notable examples are those cases where possessives of names where they create common words. An excellent example for snowfox121 is:

Art's Christian market

If Google did what snowfox121 suggested, if I entered that I wouldn't find the site about the Christian market run by Art, but instead would get a lot of vendors who happen to sell Christian art. Not gonna be any good for Art if his market didn't sell any artwork, but instead focused on things like books about Christianity.

[Dante_Maure]

My pleasure rfdgxm... the examples could just go on and on with terms that are likely to have a totally different intention with plurality.

Just to beat a dead horse... here are a few more examples I left out of the post above...

"Football" for by a sports fan.
"Footballs" is more likely to be someone searching for sporting goods.

"Personal" has an entirely different meaning than "Personals"

Can you tell that I enjoy coming up with these? ;)

[vitaplease]

AV Prisma [uk.altavista.com] has an option offering some other typo/plural versions.

also for UK/US/single/plural spelling variations:
[webmasterworld.com...]

[rfgdxm1]

>My pleasure rfdgxm... the examples could just go on and on with terms that are likely to have a totally different intention with plurality.

And possessives. Search engines can't read minds. If I enter "Art's Christian market" (no quotation marks), it makes a lot more sense for the search engine to assume that I have entered the correct search for what I want, rather than to assume that something I didn't enter was what I wanted. Web searchers need to learn how to use search engines. Certainly that idea works better than developing a search engine that can telepathically make contact with the searcher to find out what they really are looking for. ;)

[snowfox121]

Okay, okay! (throwing hands up in the air)

You've all made excellent points and i accept them. As one poster pointed out, my case may be an exception that proves the current system is best.

thanks for all your input.