What's Google doing to my search?
by florian vogler :: Google | Domino Server Monitoring
I did a search on "Domino Server Monitoring panagenda" today to see how our Domino Server Monitoring & Reporting solution greenLight does in google (don't ask; and I included "panagenda" in the search on purpose to get an idea of how often we show up);
Here are the result counts as of today:
It looks like as if with the German language selected, one or more of the search terms are considered to be stop-words (as searching for less terms increases the result), but I have difficulties understanding why any of the terms Domino, Server, Monitoring or panagenda should be stopwords in German ... ? - it's pretty much the same on google.de, different only by one or two results which I consider to be plain indexing issues.
What also confuses me is that AND'ing the search terms produces more results than if you don't AND them. On the result page, Google even explicitly states
Does anyone know why a.) the results in German and English are so different (in this particular / similar cases) and b.) why apparently AND'ing search terms increases the result?
Hey, potentially it's an April fool's joke (by Google of course, not me)!
Here are the result counts as of today:
| host | ?hl= (language) | search | # of results |
| google.at | de | domino server monitoring panagenda | 227 (huh?) |
| google.at | de | domino and server and monitoring and panagenda | 85 |
| google.at | en | domino server monitoring panagenda | 69 |
| google.at | en | domino and server and monitoring and panagenda | 85 (more!) |
| google.com | en | domino server monitoring panagenda | 67 |
| google.com | en | domino and server and monitoring and panagenda | 85 (more!) |
It looks like as if with the German language selected, one or more of the search terms are considered to be stop-words (as searching for less terms increases the result), but I have difficulties understanding why any of the terms Domino, Server, Monitoring or panagenda should be stopwords in German ... ? - it's pretty much the same on google.de, different only by one or two results which I consider to be plain indexing issues.
What also confuses me is that AND'ing the search terms produces more results than if you don't AND them. On the result page, Google even explicitly states
The "AND" operator is unnecessary -- we include all search terms by default.If it's unnecessary, why are the results different then? I would have understood if AND'ing search terms would produce less results because it would then perhaps not run through as many variations and combinations of words - but more? Here's the results for other search terms that show the exact same behaviour in Google:
| host | ?hl= (language) | search | # of results |
| google.com | en | ibm lotus notes domino | 855,000 |
| google.com | en | ibm and lotus and notes and domino | 1,400,000 |
| google.com | en | planet lotus org blogs news aggregation | 9,660 |
| google.com | en | planet and lotus and org and blogs and news and aggregation | 41,400 |
Hey, potentially it's an April fool's joke (by Google of course, not me)!
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