Google Hacks

Repetition Matters

Repetition matters when it comes to keywords weighting your queries.

Using keywords multiple times can have an impact on the types and number of results you get.

Don’t believe me? Try searching for internet. At the time of this writing Microsoft was the first result. Now try searching for internet internet. At this writing Yahoo! popped to the top. Experiment with this using other words, putting additional query words in if you want to. You’ll see that multiple query words can have an impact on how the search results are ordered and in the number of results returned.

How Does This Work?

Google doesn’t talk about this on their web site, so this hack is the result of some conjecture and much experimentation.

First, enter a word one time. Let’s use clothes as an example (Figure 1-7). This returns 7,050,000 results, the top being a site called “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Let’s add another clothes to the query (Figure 1-8). The number of results drops dramatically to 3,490,000, and the first result is for a clothing store. Some different finds move their way up into the top 10 results.

Figure 1-7. Result page for “clothes”

Figure 1-8. Result page for “clothes clothes”

Why stop now? Try clothes clothes clothes (Figure 1-9). The result order and results themselves remain the ...