Did you know that Google’s search engine has a little trick: by adding double quotes to keywords or key phrases, it can show only exact matches? This Thursday, Google improved the trick: the text snippet below the search results link – the text you see describing the Web content – will be formed around where the referenced word or phrase appears in the Web document.
If the user wants to search for a specific keyword, e.g. [“wireless phone charge”], then after the double quotes only the search results matching that keyword in its entirety will be displayed, not the results containing any of the 3 keywords mentioned above.
This is because sometimes quoted material appears in areas of the document that are not suitable for creating useful snippets. For example, a word or phrase may appear in a menu item on a page where you can navigate to a different part of the site. Creating snippets around such sections may not produce easy-to-read descriptions, and Google has heard feedback that people conducting citation searches value the location of the referenced material on the page, rather than the overall description of the page. This improvement was designed to help solve this problem.
And Google built on this with optimization. Positioning the small print section below the search results directly to the article snippet containing that exact keyword or key phrase means you can more easily determine where to find them after clicking on the link and visiting the content. On the desktop, Google will also bold the referenced material.
For example, if you do a search such as [“google search”], the snippet will show where the exact phrase appears.
The Google search results image for [“google search”] shows two listings and how the word “google search” is shown in bold in the snippet of each listing.
