Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I've seen the topic of plurals as keywords gone over several times, but I have not seen anything on something unusual I noticed.
Google may differentiate between singular and plural when plugging in search terms, but it seems to show little regard for changing the tense or form of the word. Is there a reason for this?
An example:
Earlier, I was searching Google, and not getting the results I wanted, I attempted to specify. I used the term 'creating' as part of my search, and was surprised when all of the first page results, including the number one, showed with the bolded terms 'creative' and 'create'. While 'create' was more the feel I was going for (at least it's a verb), 'creative' was way off the mark, bringing up irrelevant results.
Is this something that happens when someone uses a search term that is not targeted but is assosciated with a targeted keyword? Fiddling around, I noticed that 'looking' brought up many matched results, since it's probably targeted by classified sites and listings. Is it Google attempting to customize and 'rethink' your search for you? If it helps, I was not signed in or using personalized search at the time.
And, if Google will adjust what you put into the search bar, is there any point to target less-used ('longtail' seems to be the term) phrases and word forms?
Earlier, I was searching Google, and not getting the results I wanted, I attempted to specify. I used the term 'creating' as part of my search, and was surprised when all of the first page results, including the number one, showed with the bolded terms 'creative' and 'create'. While 'create' was more the feel I was going for (at least it's a verb), 'creative' was way off the mark, bringing up irrelevant results.
slapstick - Welcome to the forums. This recognition of variations in a word is known as "stemming," and is something Google began to introduce several years back.
In my experience, Google favors the exact words searched when your query returns a lot of pages. If you're searching a phrase that doesn't have a lot of pages or good quality pages, I've noticed that Google will begin returning pages with variations on the terms.
It may also be that some of the pages you're seeing satisfy the original query, but also contain stemmed variations on one of the words, and that you're simply seeing the variations highlighted. I'm not quite sure when the stemmed highlighting might kick in, and how much is highlighting and how much is stemmed results, if you follow.
To search WebmasterWorld for more about stemming on Google, try this search [google.com] on Google...
site:webmasterworld.com stemming google
Note that beginning with the tenth result, the word stem is very occasionally highlighted in addition to the word stemming, albeit most of the subsequent results clearly satisfy the search for "stemming" as well.
And, if Google will adjust what you put into the search bar, is there any point to target less-used ('longtail' seems to be the term) phrases and word forms?
All other things being equal, Google will probably favor the most exact match it can find. Given that viewpoint, how would you answer your question?
(Note that inbound links are also a factor).
[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 5:32 am (utc) on Mar. 3, 2007]
