Want Google to search for exactly what you're after? As you know, Google has this strange idea that it knows best, and if you search for one thing, it'll quite often search for something else, or vary the spelling, or drop words from the search, and all this without telling you. It's then necessary to go back to your search and tell Google to search for just what you want. In 'the old days' you could use the + symbol, but Google has stolen that for the GooglePlus pages application, replacing it with the double quote symbol, which isn't quite the same deal at all. However, they've now produced a Verbatim tool. This is how it works. Let's try a search for the word 'libraries' because that's what I want. I start with a screen full of location data:
I then move into a bunch of results, some of which include libraries, but there's also a lot of results coming up on the word library:
(There's actually a lot more than you see in this screen shot). Now, I could use the doublequote system, but if I click on the search tools option on the left hand side of the screen to expand it:
I've now got the 'Verbatim' option. Google describes this thus: "But, for the occasions when you want to search for very specific words, you can use the Verbatim tool so that Google searches using the exact words you entered." Now, ideally I'd prefer it if Google just did what I told it to, or failing that gave me an option to have Verbatim turned on all the time, but it doesn't. My results now look like this:
Page after page of results, all about libraries.
Verbatim should be a tool that Google should not need to have created, but in their constant quest to know better than the searcher I think they've gone down a blind alley, and Verbatim is their way of trying to reverse back out of it. Obviously the more terms in the search, the more effective this new tool will be, but a toggle to turn it on and off would be appreciated.
I did not knew about this one, and it's so easy... Google Verbatim.. Thanks for the info.
Posted by: Coddy | November 22, 2011 at 01:03 PM