Can anyone tell me why you get the results you do when you perform a search for “**” on Google? (and perhaps more importantly, why they are in that order)
You’re currently reading “Google search for “**”,” an entry on :Ben Metcalfe Blog
Why the F**k are you **terested?
Because if you do a view source on the cached copy, not the current copy, you will find instances of “**” in the source.
So google have decided that * and & are valid characters for searching, but $ and - etc aren’t, so still get stripped out.
It’s just a question of which characters you consider to be valid. After that, it’s plain old regular google juice ranking stuff.
Why they are being so selective about which characters they accept is more interesting - you would have though a search for “50%” might have some value.
It treats * as a wildcard. If you search “Apple * Computer” you see that it is bolding all the words between Apple and Computer. So when you search for ** You’re probably just getting a nondertiministic result of all indexed pages. Does 9 billion hits look right for everything?
You’re probably just getting a nondertiministic result of all indexed pages.
Sure. So the interesting question is are the pages that come top (eg Macromedia) the most google juice’d pages on the internet?
That’s the bit I was (perhaps badly) referring to.
Na - they are mainly PR (page rank) 9 pages.
Although, some results appear pretty close to the list of PR10 pages (Adobe, Macromedia, dotEDUs etc)… http://www.seocompany.ca/pagerank/pr-10-pages.php
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