Is this new or have I been asleep?

Hyphenated and non-hyphenated serps differ

[HitProf]

This might be very old and common, but is suddenly strikes me. In a search for blue widgets both blue widgets and blue-widgets are returnend. In a search for blue-widgets the blue widges are left out. How long has this been the case?

[webnewton]

i dont think it's something new. Even i'd to ponder about it sometime back. But this is how google has responded to such queries.

[albert]

I observe both with some of my domains:

with more common kws search for 'kwkw', 'kw kw' and for 'kw-kw' are the same for my rankings, but differ a little bit down in SERPS. - For less common kws it's totally different.

I guess G knows some about common compound nouns now - I observed it first around Florida, I'd say.

At the other hand the '-' used in searches does nothing else as joining 2 kws together in that order, AFAIK.

[HitProf]

I've always found it annoying when I type in a special character like a hyphen, Google seems to ignore it. Usually people don't type in specials characters for nothing. So I was surprised to find only 7 results for a specific query where I expected thousands.