Google: "widget" vs. "+widget"

[pmkpmk]

Hi,

I have an online feedback of referrers running for my site. When a new referrer comes up, I check it out myself.

The typical Google-referrer is for "widget" - and I get quite good rankings for it. Today, however, I got the first Google search for "+widget", and all of a sudden I'm on page 3 or 4 instead of page 1.

Google's online-help is a bit short on the topic of the stop-word character "+". So what happened?

[takagi]

Google will ignore some common words in a query. In a search for 'the house' on www.google.com the word 'the' is ignored and the warning

"the" is a very common word and was not included in your search.

is displayed. For www.google.de something similar happens when searching for 'der Mann'. You can see the warning:

"der" ist ein sehr häufiges Wort und wurde in der Suchanfrage ignoriert.

This can be overruled by putting a '+' before a common word.
So it only makes sense to add the '+' if your keyword happens to be a common word in the language-version of Google used by your visitor.

[ciml]

Odd. I don't see how the "+" would make a difference in Google, unless the search term is a domain name or a stop word as takagi points out.