Google upgraded its quoted searches
Google has made it easier to search by putting quotation
marks around a word or phrase on its search engine. Quoted search refers to
placing quotation marks around a search term and Google shows results with
those exact words. Quoted search is the best in getting specific on something you
are searching for on the web. Google also has a few nice improvements to its
search results. That is search for an exact word or phrase with Google Search underneath
a search result displaying precisely where to find a quoted term in bold text.
It opens in a new tab.
A blog post on Google about the change suggests a good image illustrating how the quoted search will work in practice. As shown, the two snippets in the example both include the bolded phrase “Google Search.” Originally, Google would show you results with the quoted word or phrase, however, the small snippet may not show “exactly where the phrase appeared on a page.”
Google Software Engineer Yonghao Jin explains why that was
and why it made the change:
“In the past, we
did not always do this because sometimes the quoted material appears in areas
of a document that do not lend themselves to creating helpful snippets. For
example, a word or phrase might appear in the menu item of a page, where you
would navigate to different sections of the site. Creating a snippet around
sections like that might not produce an easily readable description.
We have heard
feedback that people doing quoted searches value seeing where the
quoted material occurs on a page, rather than an overall description of the page.
Our improvement is designed to help address this.”
Although Google acknowledges that the snippet changes are
neither perfect nor universal. Thus, if a quoted term appears multiple times, the
snippet may or may not show results if they are apart from each other.
Additionally, bolder terms will be exclusive on Google Search’s desktop. Bold
text will not appear in snippets on certain search modes like images, and news,
nor on mobile.