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Re: How does Google deal with plural?

  • Subject: Re: How does Google deal with plural?
  • From: Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Thu, 12 Jan 2006 16:57:13 +0000
  • Newsgroups: alt.internet.search-engines
  • Organization: schestowitz.com / MCC / Manchester University
  • References: <1137080535.613935.51520@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> <dq5tp4$hsg$02$1@news.t-online.com>
  • Reply-to: newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • User-agent: KNode/0.7.2
__/ [Stacey] on Thursday 12 January 2006 15:48 \__

> <christian9997@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
> news:1137080535.613935.51520@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> Hi
>>
>> Just wondering how Google selects and ranks results.
> 
> Very carefully.:-)


*grin*


>> I've got a website that contains car information if I want my website
>> to be found by people looking for "car" and people looking for "cars"
>> what should I put in the title:
> 
> This is known as stemming with the plural and such. Google use to rank them
> the same but now it is different. The plural and non is serperate ranking
> results but you can be ranked well in both. I rank well with rag rug and
> rag rugs. But better with rag rugs because that is the most term used when
> someone is searching.


I was about the same the same thing. It's contradictory to stemming, but
exceptions are being made. Perhaps the size of the index (scalability) and
the number of pages crawled makes stemming less necessary or a weaker
constraint.

I still wonder if verbs are stemmed at all. I am fairly sure that stemming is
neglected or non-existent. 'run' and 'running' are spearate unless they both
appear in a page and have some proximity. What I fail to get to grips with
is the observation that stemming got merely dropped while useful operations
like AND, OR, +, -, and quotes were deprived. There is no effort to index
punctuation either, so searching for code is hard.


>> "The car website"?
>> Will Google automatically recognise that this is also aimed at people
>> looking for "cars"?
>> If so will my website be ranked behind the websites containing "cars"
>> in their titles?
>>
>> "The website for cars"?
>> Will Google automatically recognise that this is also aimed at people
>> looking for "car"?
>> If so will my website be ranked behind the websites containing "car" in
>> their titles?
>>
>> "The website for car and cars"?
>> Would this be better than the other two options?
>>
>> Thanks for any help
> 
> You should put in your title what you want your site to be more about. Then
> in your text and such use both the plural and singular throughout and get
> links with both as the anchor text. Always shoot for both if you want both.
> You can even have 2 pages that focuses on either or.


You can also have both words in the title. Use something subtle to combine
the two, e.g. "Cars on-line: The car Web site". Titles like "Bad
Behavior/Behaviour" (a PHP plug-in) have become more common. They are used
once the Webmaster realises that by opting for one, the other is missed. A
look at the referral log reveals that both have potential and 'diluting' the
title by adding another term is fine as long as the page is well-ranked and
can stay at the top, particularly in page 1.

Roy

PS - typos have potential too. I currently get 3 Google referrals a day for
'wikipendia' (sic).

-- 
Roy S. Schestowitz      |    Useless fact: Every polar bear is left-handed
http://Schestowitz.com  |    SuSE Linux     |     PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
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      http://iuron.com - next generation of search paradigms

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