Adding /* to a regular Google search term - what does it do?

[gehrlekrona]

Just a quick question.
If I search for widgets for sale and search for widgets for sale/* I get totally different results. What exactly does the /* do?
Does it just take the widgets for sale and concatenates the / and then add everything else after that?

I also did wdgets for/* sale/* and then I get every fri**in spam page there is in Google....

Same thing with widgets for/* sale/&

I know that if you use the /* in the site command then you can see what's not in supplemental, so does the /* in widgets for sale/* bring out the supplementals?

[edited by: tedster at 5:51 pm (utc) on Oct. 6, 2007]
[edit reason] moved from another location [/edit]

[tedster]

This is turning out to be a fascinating research question for me - I see all kinds of interesting additional words being bolded in the results. At first I thought it was giving a deeper look into synonyms - deeper than the one provided by the tilde operator [~] - but it's not that. It almost looks like it adds high level co-occuring terms into the search.

[gehrlekrona]

At least in the searches I do, if you want to see google books then add widgets for sale¦*

Haven't found a way to get rid of the books yet....
One site I see that are parked on the last page is number 4 in one of my searches. If I do a widget sale/* its gone.... same number of results but different....

[tedster]

I revise my original idea - the bolding for a regular /* search is acting more like the pattern matching wildcard it normally is (keyword *). Almost any word that follows immediately after the search term is getting bolded. Some variations on this that I can't yet make sense of are:

1. Under what conditions does the bolding extend beyond the first neighboring word and include a longer 2 or 3 word phrase?

2. Under what conditions does the bolding NOT include a neighboring word? For example, the neighboring word "and" is often bolded, but a word strongly related by meaning or co-ocurence may not be.

[Robert Charlton]

I revise my original idea - the bolding for a regular /* search is acting more like the pattern matching wildcard it normally is (keyword *). Almost any word that follows immediately after the search term is getting bolded. Some variations on this that I can't yet make sense of are:

1. Under what conditions does the bolding extend beyond the first neighboring word and include a longer 2 or 3 word phrase?

Several notes on the above. I just came to this after posting about a sudden drop I'd seen on an inside page for a single word search...

[webmasterworld.com...]

I thought I'd try the slash and wildcard character with the single-word search I'd seen drop.

Brief thoughts only....

Various combinations of the slash and wildcard character and spaces after the word bring back the page that was dropped, and in fact put it above the index page that had remained.

Patterns I observe also appear to depend on what the word is. Eg, for the singleword I'd searched for, upon quick examination, anyway, these give the same result...

singleword *
singleword*
singleword /*

Omitting the space after "singleword" gives a slightly different result...

singleword/*

And yes, there are more than an expected number of book results in the mix.

All of the searches seem to bring up sites with what I'd call a higher "research" quality score. This is a sloppy description, but it's almost as if you took Yahoo's Mindset and pushed the results towards "researching" (but the results are very different from Mindset's).

Some other words, though, appear to give vastly differing results among the different syntaxes I note, so we can't generalize based on the set of searches I did.

tedster's observation about the bolding is fascinating. It almost seems that if there's a related set of words that follows the bolded search term, they're also bolded, like a broader kind of stemming... but if you get into a word string from a different word family, they aren't bolded.

Wish I had more time right now... forgive hasty observations.

[Robert Charlton]

PS - I should note that asterisks in combination with single word searches are discussed in the above mentioned thread. They almost seem to remove a "filter" and bring back prior single-word rankings....

Major Shift in One Word Search Results
Continued from original post of May 24
[webmasterworld.com...]

Note that the shift in serps and the terms highlighted change quite a bit depending on whether the asterisk (or asterisk and slash) is before or after the singleword being searched.

The effect I'm seeing (and it's hard to decide whether I should post in this thread or that thread about it), is as if you're running two searches... one for singleword plus anything, and one for a stem-of-singleword plus a related term. The order of these affects what is highlighted (part of the topic on this thread) and whether your page is boosted or not (the topic of the other thread).

[gehrlekrona]

Not sure if this thread should be moved to SERP changes or have a link to this thread from the other one?

[tedster]

We're not talking about SERP changes here, we're trying to understand what Google is showing in the results for this search method. We don't know even that much - but it is an intriguing question. That's why I split this topic off into its own thread, so the SERPs Changes thread can stay on track. Trying to draw conclusions when you don't even know how Google is responding to the /* wouldn't work out.

[vincevincevince]

I am not seeing any differences for all terms I tested (six terms, three single-word three double word) when using /* compared to using *

Wikipedia loses position with this addition.

[gehrlekrona]

vincevincevince,
that's interesting! What I have been searching for things I have been using for sale and sell. Did you use any thing like it?What type of info did you look for?
Jusr wondering if it certain things it applies to.
Ted,
I understand!

[tedster]

Because it's difficult to name these searches, I'd like to call them:

#1 -- clean-search keyword
#2 -- slash-star keyword/*
#3 -- space-star keyword *
#4 -- immediate-star keyword*

I see small shifts between #2, 3 and 4 on most one word searches - sometimes the only changes are which words get bold type, but there are changes. In fact, it's the bolding that interests me almost more than the rankings.

More variation creeps in when there's a two word phrase. On one search, I see a.gov site get indented results for slash-star and immediate star - but the indented result falls to page 2 on a space-star search.

On another 1-word term, I see the space-star search awarding the #1 position SiteLinks, and it doesn't have Site Links even on a clean search. Whatever we're playing with here, it seems to be exposing some of the Rube Goldberg workings that go into creating a SERP.

[gehrlekrona]

When I use widgets/* I get a lot what lloklike words related to widgets. I see widget and widgets and it is almost like suggestions you get from AdWords or related searches....
I see widgets shows, widget lover, widget parks, widget boutiques. All bolded...
I also see, in bold, widget currently circulating, more "sentecne like" results.
If I use widgets/** I see something REALLY interesting. First result is a song and it has music notes in front of the listing and it says "More music results for widgets /**" First time I have ever seen that! Didn't see it at first but it says, in the blue bar, Web, Music, News....

When I use 2 stars I see more of my search in both title and description...

Not sure what to make of it all but it might be something Google uses to test results and now when it has been exposed it might go away very soon.

[outland88]

I don't think its by chance that Google books surface frequently. Google seems to have been working the long-tail for a while with the more exotic searches. It seems some of this wierdness is set up to give some sites a boost in traffic IMO.