Aug 08, 2022 06:00:00

Official commentary on how to use ''' to improve the accuracy of Google search

Some people who frequently use Google search use quotation marks ''' to create words and sentences such as '

'GIGAZINE' ' and ' 'Headline news on Thursday, August 4, 2022' '. Many people know the technique of displaying only the results that exactly match the enclosed words by enclosing them. Google explains on the official page about tips and notes about search techniques using such '''.

How we're improving search results when you use quotes
https://blog.google/products/search/how-were-improving-search-results-when-you-use-quotes/

In Google search, by enclosing a word or sentence in ''', it is possible to display only results that exactly match the enclosed word. For example, if you search normally with the phrase ' set the air conditioner to less than 27 degrees', you will see pages that are judged to be highly relevant even though they do not actually say 'set the air conditioner to less than 27 degrees'. …

If you search for ''

Set the air conditioner below 27 degrees' ' in quotation marks, only pages that actually contain this phrase will be displayed in the search results, so you can narrow down your search results.

According to Yonghao Jin, who works for Google's search team, Google has made some improvements to searches using quotes. Previously, the snippet (sentence indicating the contents of the web page) displayed on the search results screen was sometimes unrelated to the search word, but at the time of article creation, the part containing the search word was displayed as a snippet. It becomes easy to understand where the search word is on the web page, and in the desktop version the search word is bold.

Also, Jin mentions some caveats for those searching with quotes.

◆ Content that is not necessarily immediately found on the page may be caught
Searches using quotation marks may match content that is not directly displayed on the page, such as the

meta description tag used to convey the content of the page and the ALT text used to describe the image. If you can't find the wording you searched for on the opened web page, Jin advises that you can search within the page with 'Ctrl + F' or search from the developer tools .

◆ The page may have been updated after Google obtained the information
Google periodically visits webpages to obtain information and display search results based on that, but it may have been updated since Google last visited the page. In that case, even though you should have done an exact match search, there will be a situation where there is no corresponding description on the page. In this case, you may be able to display the page that Google last accessed by trying 'Display web pages cached in Google search results '. Specifically, click the small triangle icon to the right of the page URL displayed on the search results screen and select 'Cache'.

◆ Punctuation marks may be considered spaces
Google's search system recognizes some punctuation marks as spaces, which may affect searches using quotes. Mr. Jin gives an example of ''don't doesn't'', but even if you try searching for ' 'people are so '' in Japanese, the snippet displayed on the search results screen will be You can see that various patterns of 'people are so (people are so)' are displayed.

◆Snippets may not quote multiple applicable passages
If there are multiple quotes on the web page, not all of them will be displayed in the snippet.

◆ Does not work with searches displayed with a map
Searches using quotes do not work when search results are displayed with Google Maps. This area will be investigated further in the future.

While Jin acknowledges that quote searches are definitely a useful tool, he recommends searching without quotes first, as basic Google search accuracy has improved considerably in recent years. increase. In particular, quote searches do not display ``closely related search results with slightly different words'', so sometimes useful search results may be missed.