Wednesday, November 19, 2003

Google Synonym Behaviour

You probably know that you can google using the synonym operator preceding a keyword. A tilde, e.g. ~visual-basic. Now you might also know that you can find out about all the synonyms Google stores by excluding bold words from the result list. Like ~visual-basic -visual-basic will return “VisualBasic” in the result.
What was new to me until I tried out today is that synonyms don’t just form a group, but that you might find e.g. “Visual-Basic” being a synonym for “VB” – not the other way round.

Try this search ...

~vb -vb -code

.. and “Visual Basic” is highlighted in the SERPs.
Now try ...

~visual-basic -visual-basic -visualbasic

... and you won’t get any results, even though “VB” is not excluded. Which means that A can trigger B, without B triggering A – the relationship is not necessary bidirectional. You can also find proof with other keywords, like “War” has “Vietnam” as synonym, but “Vietnam” doesn’t have “War” as synonym.

Google Synonym Behaviour by Philipp Lenssen

>> More posts

Advertisement