Google Exact Phrase Search Broken

• Posted by Badi Jones on May 3rd, 2006 - Comment on this Post »

This is really weird. If you try to search for an exact phrase in Google right now, for example, “some fun rss mainstream lining” (in quotes).

Google returned:

Results 1 – 10 of about 462 for “some fun rss mainstream lining”. (0.26 seconds)

I saw no bolded terms in the results, so I clicked the first result. My search phrase was nowhere to be found. So I went back to the results page and clicked on the cached link to see if the text was there at one time.

At the top of the cached page, where Google would usually highlight the matching text, I saw this instead:

These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: some fun rss mainstream lining

This makes me wonder if this was a major algorithm update. If so, it wasn’t publicized like bigdaddy or Bourbon.

Whether it’s a glitch or an update, this is a major problem, and I hope they fix it soon.
For more, see this thread at google groups.

Share This

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!