"intitle" and "inurl" not working properly?

"intitle" and "inurl" field searches

[TanyaHC]

Hi everybody,

Has anybody noticed Google doing funny things lately with "intitle" and other field searches?

If you run the following search for example:

intitle:glossary "solder pad"

or, even worse:

intitle:dictionary "solder pad"

... you would normally find pages with "glossary" or "dictionary" in their title and containing the phrase "solder pad" somewhere in the text.

However, nowadays some of your results will contain "glossary" (or "dictionary") in their title, BUT NOT ALL OF THEM! Weird. It seems as though Google is not quite obeying the restriction set with "intitle"! The same goes for "inurl".

Does anyone know what is going on?

Many thanks.

Tanya Harvey Ciampi (grateful for any clues...)

[vitaplease]

Hi Tanya, welcome to WebmasterWorld and well spotted,

As far as I could tell it seems intitle: works at all times if searching for one word only. (intitle:dictionary)

More words in the search query, even in "exact form" mess up as you say. (intitle:dictionary book)

Not an exhaustive check but with the search results of intitle:dictionary book, if you check the source code of the first example Merriam-Webster OnLine, it does carry some html code with "title - dictionary and book" other than the normal title tag - maybe thats the mess-up?

I have never checked this advanced search function as to how it worked with more words in title in the past. Maybe it was exacter, maybe things have to do with the recent update which was a bit different.

[TanyaHC]

Dear vitaplease,

Thanks for your reply regarding Google's "intitle" and "inurl" not working properly.

The reason I asked is because some time ago I developed some "WWW Search Interfaces" ( http://www.multilingual.ch ) that narrow down a web search (separating the web wheat from the click chaff) to locate glossaries containing definitions of user-defined terms, and now I see that "intitle" and "inurl" are not responding properly, which mucks things up.

Shame, these techniques were very effective.

I just hope that the people at Google realize that searching with Google under these circumstances is no longer as effective as it used to be...

Let's just hope that things return to normal soon!

Ciao,

Tanya Harvey Ciampi
Locarno, Switzerland

[vitaplease]

Gruezi Tanya,

you could always have a look at Alltheweb advanced search, but then a real Google addict and Google Hacks contributor would consider that not done ;)

(just read its top10 NewYork bestseller list at the moment)

PS. Nice tool, you might want to move your url to your profile though. TOS [webmasterworld.com]

[Brett_Tabke]

Generally, intitle has always had a problem when combined with other search features. Take off the quotes and it works as you'd expect. Most of the advanced features are tricky when you combine them with anything else.