Confused about underscores

how does a search on Brett match Brett_Tabke?

[gilli]

A couple of weeks ago there was a thread discussing the hyphen (-) and underscore (_) characters and how Google treats them. There are also various other threads discussing the same thing (site search on "underscore hyphen google").

My understanding of the end result was that hyphens are treated as spaces (or word separators) but underscores are not:

"this-that" = "this that"
"this_that"!= "this that"

OK all makes sense so far?

If this is the case then how does a search on "Brett" (http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/13907-1-15.htm) match his profile page which only contains the word "Brett" as part of the substring "Brett_Tabke"?

Is this a case of inbound link text creating the association between the two terms? Not from what I can see.

Any ideas?

[Macguru]

As far as Google is target, use "-" not "_" in filenames. For the rest, use "-".

[relgoog]

I'll have to remember this one.
Cheers.

[gilli]

Macguru if I understand you correctly you are saying the underscore character is treated diffently in URLs to how it is treated in content?

[Macguru]

Well, as far as I know, filenames are of some importance for plain vanilla sites...

[ciml]

I think that the answer is in allinanchor:brett [google.com]. It would only take one link with "Brett" as anchor text to make his profile appear for that search.

For the moment, I would stick with received wisdom. Hyphen equals space, but not underscore.