Google Results Ignoring Part of Search String

[potentialgeek]

I just noticed Google started ignoring part of a search string, choosing to omit one of four words. I wasn't aware it was doing this. When did it start doing it?

Of course, I'm not referring to words like "the" or "and" etc., which it has ignored for a long time. In the case I'm referring to, the search string was:

Keyword1 Keyword2 Adjective1 Keyword3.

Google ignored the adjective. I wouldn't normally check to see if Google was ignoring some search words, but in this one search string record I found in Google Analytics, the adjective is a word I wouldn't normally use and didn't think I'd used. So I checked the page and the Google cache and, sure enough, it's not there.

Is Google's new position: "If we see four words you keyed in, we'll assume results for three out of four will be good enough for you."

Not complaining, just observing. It just seems new and more intuitive (giving more weight to nouns than adjectives). It may also be leveraging popular search strings it recognizes (without the adjective). Keyword1 Keyword2 Keyword3 in the above example is a popular search string.

p/g

[tedster]

It's pretty common to get some results that don't contain one one of the words in a multi-term search. I think you just hit on one where the relevance scores are particularly high for the 3-word combination you mentioned. I'll bet if you continue on into deeper results pages you will see your term on some of the results.

Click into the cached page for one of those results you are looking at - see what Google says about the "missing" term at the top.