Hack 6 Word Order Matters
 
Rearranging your query can have quite an
effect.
Who would have thought it? The order in
which you put your keywords in a Google query can be every bit as
important as the query words themselves. Rearranging a query can
change not only your overall result count but also what results rise
to the top. While one might expect this of quote-enclosed
phrases—"have you any wool"
versus "wool you any have"—it
may come as a surprise that it also affects sets of individual query
words.
Google does warn you of this right up front: "Keep
in mind that the order in which the terms are typed will affect the
search results." Yet it provides little in the way
of explanation or suggestion as to how best to formulate a query to
take full advantage of this fact.
A little experimentation is definitely in order.
Search for the words (but not as
a quote-enclosed phrase) hey
diddle diddle. Figure 1-4 shows the results.
The top results, as expected, do include the phrase
"hey diddle diddle."
Now give diddle hey
diddle a whirl. Again, it should come as no
surprise that the first result contains the phrase
"diddle hey diddle." Figure 1-5 shows the results.
Finally, search for diddle diddle hey (Figure 1-6).
Another set of results, though this time it isn't
clear that Google is finding the phrase "diddle
diddle hey" first. (It does show up in the third
result's snippet.)
6.1 What's Going On?
It appears that even if you don't specify a search
as a phrase, Google accords any occurence of the words as a phrase
greater weight and more prominence. This is followed by measures of
adjacency
between the words and then, finally, the weights of
the individual words themselves.
6.2 Strategies
Searching all query word
permutations
is a cumbersome thought at best. That said, it can be surprisingly
effective in squeezing a few more results from the Google index. If
you decide to do so, bear the following strategies in mind:
Try phrases with and without quotes. Make your query as specific as possible, leaving fewer words and thus
fewer possible permutations.
Try the more obvious permutation before the
nonsensical—hey diddle diddle before
diddle hey diddle.
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