DOCID: 4046925
UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
Beyond the use of the OR operator in its simple search, Google does not support boolean search.
While Google assumes that multiple keywords are a phrase, searchers can delimit phrases using double-quotes. For example, if I search on:
[the last king of france]
without double-quotes, Google will ignore the "the" and the "of" in its search. The results I get include many irrelevant hits, such as music from a group called "The Last King" and an article about Lance Armstrong. However, if I enclose the same query in double-quotes, Google will search on exactly the phrase ["the last king of france"], and return a result with the name of the last king of France. Enclosing searches in double-quotes is much more effective for finding precise results than relying on automatic phrase searching.
Google no longer routinely ignores stop words outside double quotes. Each of these searches will now return different results:
[the last king of france] [last king france] ["the last king of france"]
Stop words are English words that are so commonplace they are not included in a search unless the searcher forces Google to do so. The stop words Google recognizes include: a, an, about, and, are, as, at, be, by, com, from, how, I, in, is, it, of, on, or, that, the, this, to, we, what, when, where, which, with, why. There probably are others!
However, Google's handling of stop words is inconsistent. For example, in the query [to be or not to be], Google ignores or because it may be a logical operator, and it also appears to ignore to and be, only searching for not. Therefore, you may need to force Google to search for a stop word on occasion. There is a Google hack for forcing Google to search for stop words.
It is unnecessary to use the plus sign (+) with any terms except stop words because by default Google searches for all keywords. However, there are many times when searchers need to exclude certain terms that are commonly associated with a keyword but irrelevant to their search. That's where the minus sign (-) comes in. Using the minus sign in front of a keyword ensures that Google excludes that term from the search. For example, the results for the search ["pearl harbor" -movie] are very different from the results for ["pearl harbor"].
Google's handling of words with diacritical marks such as accents or umlauts is inconsistent. By default, Google will search for terms matching those with and without the diacritic. As Google's Vanessa Fox explains, "When a searcher enters a query that includes a word with accented characters, our algorithms consider web pages that contain versions of that word both with and without the accent. For
