Researching Through Google.

Anthony:

Please forgive me, but I believe you're mistaken.

Google defaults to AND or as they say, posts using all the words; although there may be other words between your keywords. The use of "quotes" is when you want an exact string match of your search term such as the line from a poem, book title, etc.

The use of the + is superfluous; although the minus sign is still relevant if you want to omit terms from your results. For example, search for HEAVY METAL -MUSIC -COMIC will give you pages about uranium, but not Megadeth or the comic books..

Respectfully,
KirkS

http://www.google.com/advanced_search

You may be right Kirk but it is not my experience.

perth weather today returns 2,930,000. +perth +weather +today returns 2,630,000 so there is some difference.
I have always found the results more accurate when using +.

Google is good if you don't really know what you anticipate finding, but if you find something good, doesn't it make sense to go back again the next time?

I just memorize some of the websites I use frequently. the bank, the newspaper on line... the travel links ? Good for your brain too.

The US standard of NOAA.org is spot on for me, and I like being able to see the radar if I want.

perth weather today returns 2,930,000. +perth +weather +today returns 2,630,000 so there is some difference.

The exact way in which operators such as quotes and pluses work on single words is not fully revealed to the end-user, but one effect is to suppress "similar" words. So a search of weather may include "weathering", while a search for +weather may suppress it. It's not that simple, and, unfortunately, like so many other fields of computing, the engineers at Google seem to think it's smarter than the user. I joked on Twitter one time that I wanted a "No, [insulting word], I MEAN WHAT I TYPED" button on Google. :^)

Also, Google searches look for words in text links to the site. Like, if a blog says "Here in Perth it rained three inches today!", but didn't use the word 'weather', and another blog linked to it and said "They're having some wet weather in Perth!", then 'weather' would be associated with the page anyway, and 'Perth' would be given extra weight to take it towards the top of a list. Using this intentionally is one form of "googlejacking".

But @AnthonyUK, if searches defaulted to a logical OR, then perth weather today would include pages with "perth", but not "weather" nor "today". But +perth -weather -today yields 75,300,000 results. So it is definitely not working as a logical OR.

Rod, Google is constantly changing it's booleen search methods. I really don't care how fast they searched something, but I do care that if they return a search that has over a zillion results I want to see that it is all in the same area of requested info.

I'm trying to get use to Bing. It does seem to spit back info that is more relevant to what I requested. It's image search is fine, but maybe I'm just expecting more out of it than it can really do right now.

Donna

That's interesting,Donna,
I'll tinker with Bing.

As an aside, I reported my town as having the
driest year on record.
That night it rained, and it hasn't stopped yet
(3 days/nights)
I am considering the 74.5 curse has been invoked.

I went to bing
I clicked "do I need to pack my jumper today?"
it flew straight to Perth Weather....then blank
and locked up my screen

In its defence it is raining here and my
wireless broadband has slowed considerably.