Google is constantly updating and tinkering with its search algorithms, and most of the time we never notice. The service is a black box, and what goes on inside is anybody's guess.
But I've noticed something in the last week that's going to affect the way I type queries. About a decade ago (cripes), I picked up the habit from Robot Wisdom, the granddaddy of all blogs, of searching for a phrase by typing periods between the words instead of the more common way of surrounding the phrase with quotation marks. It's much easier to touch-type
three.one.two
than
"three one two"
especially when you're searching for two phrases at once, which I sometimes do when I'm looking up lyrics, bits of dialogue, or something I remember from a news article. Typing quotation marks requires pressing shift and moving your hands, but periods are easy. And until very recently, the results were identical.
This no doubt exploited some quirk of Google's punctuation handling, and I can see that there aren't many people who do this, so the side effect was bound to disappear at some point. I'm just surprised it has lasted this long. I'm sure this latest change includes lots of invisible improvements that we'll all grow accustomed to without realizing it, so I won't complain that this now produces different results from this.
Time to retrain my fingers.
I've always used
three-one-two
which was documented as being the same as the quoted version, though doesn't appear to return exactly the same results.
Mike — November 3rd, 2008 at 7:31 pmYeah, it used to be that just about any punctuation would work sort of like a non-breakable space (and even a collapsable space, I think), except that colon could sometimes be confused with something else in the Google syntax (like site: or cache:). Periods were easy to type, but I guess semicolons would have been even easier.
Now, the hyphens are clearly doing something different from periods and spaces and quotation-marks-around-the-whole-thing. Strange.
Robert DAVIS — November 3rd, 2008 at 9:04 pmIt looks like a hyphen or single quote may work as substitutes. GgBlogoscoped discussed this recently: http://blogoscoped.com/forum/143671.html
jorn — November 5th, 2008 at 1:45 pmTyping hyphens or single quotation marks between the words doesn't seem to work the same as surrounding the phrase with double quotation marks, at least not today. But thanks for the link — glad I'm not the only one who noticed the change.
Robert DAVIS — November 5th, 2008 at 1:57 pmI used periods too!.. Surprising how disappointing I find this change :)
opoq — November 18th, 2008 at 11:59 pm