These search results do not include the words 'a', 'for', 'born' - why the filter?

[Syzygy]

Just been doing a couple of plagiarism related searches using whole, short sentences.

One of those sentences included the word 'born'. At the bottom of the results was the following was:

Tip: These results do not include the word "born". Show results that include "born".

Why filter it out? I've tried to replicate this with a number of contrived sentences. Sometimes the word is included, sometimes it's filtered out. Sometimes it says it's filtered out, but is clearly highlighted in the results.

This level of proactive filtering or editing seems rather, well, odd. Any reason for this?

Syzygy

[tedster]

"Born" is a very strange word to be filtered, I agree. I've been noticing this kind of behavior more often recently - sometimes with great frustration as I end up needing to add plus signs and quote marks to more and more searches.

I have the general sense that Google is folding in some new layer of semantic intelligence - something they are learning through phrase based indexing [webmasterworld.com] perhaps that is teaching them about query words that carry more weight or meaning than other words in the same search phrase. Google has moved very far from the old days of "text match" searching.

[Syzygy]

Thanks for the reply, tedster.

Well, whilst Google develops its intelligence and filters further, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the frustration you mention is being felt by an increasing number of users.

Certainly, I'm getting fed up having to make an increased percentage of searches two or three times in order to find what I used to expect to find in one.

In this respect the user experience is not being enhanced.

Let's hope the filtering algorithms improve mighty quickly or get put on the shelf.

Syzygy

[tedster]

I've been thinking about just this issue so much recently. In the beginning of Google it was the tech savvy who adopted it, recommended it to friends, family and clients and that was the beginning of its well-deserved rapid growth.

Then Google began to serve, more and more, the non-savvy masses that make up the greatest percentage of users. You and I are not the main target market. Power searchers are not the main target market. Google still does well by me, understand, but they are trying very hard to dumb things down for the end user - and that means certain features I was comfortable with are morphing away into oblivion.