[pmwiki-users] WikiWords and Google

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Sat, Mar 04, 2006 at 04:32:15PM -0700, H. Fox wrote:
> On 3/4/06, kirpi at kirpi.it <kirpi at kirpi.it> wrote:
> > Actually, my poor English let me fail once more. My real (naif?)
> > concern was not centered on "rank", but on this: if a page is
> > "RollingStones", does Google understand that I mean Rolling Stones,
> > and let me find the page as I type "Rolling Stones" in the search
> > field?
> > That was my simple question.
> 
> I believe the simple answer is: No.  RollingStones and "Rolling
> Stones" are not the same to Google.
> 
> Results 1 - 10 of about 442,000 for rollingstones. (0.11 seconds)
> Results 1 - 10 of about 25,300,000 for "rolling stones". (0.12 seconds)

This doesn't really answer the question -- the question isn't
whether the search results are the same (we know they won't be),
but rather if a search for "rolling stones" would find a page
named "Rolling Stones".  The above results don't tell us anything
about whether the 442,000 pages found by "rollingstones" also
appear in the 25,300,000 results for "rolling stones".

Mind you, I'm not saying that they *do* appear, nor am I saying
that their ranking is not somehow minimized, I'm just saying that 
the simple answer given isn't as simple as it might appear on 
its face.  :-)

Pm