DOCID: 4046925
UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
instance, if a searcher enters [México], we'll return results for pages about both "Mexico" and "México.""[1]
For example, a search on [façade] will return pages containing both facade and façade. To force Google to search only for the term with the diacritic, put a plus sign in front of the term: [+façade]. You may see a few pages that do not appear to have the diacritic, but that is probably because that term appears in anchor text or an inbound link that is pointing to the page but not actually on the page in question.
However, Fox goes on to explain that results also vary depending upon whether you are searching at Google.com or a Google international site (e. g., Google.fr), whether your preferred language at Google is English or another language, and from where you are coming to the Google site as indicated by your IP address. If Google detects that your IP address geolocates to Peru, your search results will be different from those provided to someone coming to Google from Norway, regardless of the preferred language or the site you search. Also, users who have registered with Google and set up personalized search will find that their results are affected by their previous searches. In other words, while there are ways to manipulate the results Google provides, there is no way to control them.
Google treats most punctuation marks the same way, as links in a search string. For example, Google handles a search for [c-span], [c.span], ["c span"], and [c?span] basically the same way. However, a search for [cspan] with no space or mark is treated differently.
- ↑ Vanessa Fox, "How search results may differ based on accented characters and interface languages," Official Google Blog, 32 August 31 2006, <http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/08/how-search-results-may-differ-based-on.html> (November 27, 2006).
