There are some clever ways around Googleâs limit of 10 words to a query.
Unless youâre fond of long, detailed queries, you might never have noticed that Google has a hard limit of 10 wordsâthatâs keywords and special syntaxes combinedâsummarily ignoring anything beyond. While this has no real effect on casual Google users, search-hounds quickly find this limit rather cramps their style.
Whatever shall you do?
By limiting your query to the more obscure of your keywords or phrase fragments, youâll hone results without squandering precious query words. Letâs say youâre interested in a phrase from Hamlet: âThe lady doth protest too much, methinks.â At first blush, you might simply paste the entire phrase into the query field. But thatâs seven of your 10 allotted words right there, leaving no room for additional query words or search syntax.
The first thing to do is ditch the first couple of words; âThe ladyâ is just too common a phrase. This leaves the five word âdoth protest too much, methinks.â Neither âmethinksâ nor âdothâ are words you might hear every day, providing a nice Shakespearean anchor for the phrase. That said, one or the other should suffice, leaving the query at an even four words with room to grow:
"protest too much methinks"
or:
"doth protest too much"
Either of these will provide you, within the first five results, origins of the phrase and pointers to more information.
Unfortunately, this technique wonât do you much good
in the case of âDo as I say not as I
do,â which doesnât provide much in
the way of obscurity. Attempt clarification by adding something like
quote origin English usage
and
youâre stepping beyond the ten-word limit.
Help comes in the form of Googleâs full-word wildcard [Hack #13]. It turns out that Google doesnât count wildcards toward the limit.
So when you have more than 10 words, substitute a wildcard for common words like so:
"do as * say not as * do" quote origin English usage
Presto! Google runs the search without complaint and youâre in for some well-honed results.
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