An observation about Google's result-highlighting

[Receptional Andy]

I just searched Google for a keyword that included the words 'internet explorer' (in that order). In the results, Google highlights in bold occurences of 'i.e.'.

Does this tell us anything about the way Google highlights results, or at a minimum, how it handles punctuation?

[steveb]

For about a week I've noticed odd letters highlighted for some search terms. My brain can't remember the term now but the double ll (as in "wall") was highlighted in the URL even though it wasn't in the term.

[Receptional Andy]

Do you think this affects the actual results Google returns or just how Google highlights results pages?

[tedster]

Up to now, the bold highlighting was just a last minute routine, run on a pure character match basis over the generated results page - and not an indicator of the ranking process. I still think that's the case. These new observations may indicate that "character match routine" is now informed by some additional semantic data.

I've also seen some synonyms for entered search terms showing up in bold highlighting recently. But I'm pretty sure this is still being done at the last minute, just to help attract clicks. I strongly doubt that it's been added to give webmasters more information - although there may be some information there to be extracted.

[Receptional Andy]

Up to now, the bold highlighting was just a last minute routine, run on a pure character match basis over the generated results page - and not an indicator of the ranking process

Agreed, as evidenced by "These terms only appear in links pointing to this page" in a variety of contradictory cases. I think these instances highlight mistakes in Google's keyword-highlighting process, which gives some insight into how the process was created.

As with synonyms, another 'positive' example is Google highlighting acronyms [webmasterworld.com] in search results.

Do these examples tell us anything about how Google is interpreting user search queries?

[edited by: Receptional_Andy at 12:14 am (utc) on Mar. 8, 2008]