Help Me Google!

The topic of Phrase Search was briefly discussed in my article Basic Search - Automatic Exclusion, but here I plan to go in to a little more detail. When searching with Google, by entering keywords in the search field you are effectively searching for Word1 AND Word2 AND Word3, but not in that exact order. This can lead to inaccurate results from your search. Google also has a feature called "stemming" that is supposed to be user-friendly but can also be counter productive. Phrase Searching may be a good technique to get the accurate results you are looking for and it only requires adding quotations.

In order to speed up search queries, Google excludes common words like "where" and "how", as well as some single letters and digits. Google gives an example of this by using the movie title Star Wars Episode I. By doing a Google search for this title, you may also see entries for Star Wars Episode II. To work around this issue, there are two techniques that can be used: