There are many search engines but I always use Google and Yahoo since these are a lot more comfortable compare to other ones that I am not so used to. However, even when I using these search engines to do some quick searches, I haven’t used the quotation marks. No wonder why I always had to spent lots of time on research. From the practice of using quotation marks, stop words, and trying using new search engines, I finally got some real idea of doing research in the web culture.
I’ve been using Google for several years, but I’ve never noticed that there actually is a big difference in results depending on usage of quotation marks since Google considered so much on classifying stop words in order to shorten search time and data bank space. When I tried “to be or not to be” without quotation marks, Google searched only for the word “not” and not for all other words. It said “to” and “be” are words that are very common and so were not included in my search. Also, lowercase "or" was ignored. Instead, Google recommended to try "OR" to search for either of two terms.” Most of the search results had nothing to do with the phrase “to be or not to be.” When “to be or not to be” was entered with quotation marks, Google mainly looked for the whole phrase “to be or not to be” without breaking them up. And the most results were according to what the phrase were popularly known for. I tried one more search here using “Edvard Munch.” For this one, whether it was entered with quotation marks or not, results for both were very similar since the name does not include any stop words and also, it is not that common name either.
In Ask Jeeves, results were similar from Goolge. For “to be or not to be,” it only looked for pages that contained the word “not” and not for all other words when it was entered without quotation marks. And when quotation marks were included, it then searched for the whole phrase. Here, Ask Jeeves was also ignoring stop words probably for the same reason as Google.
Mooter is a search engine that I used for the first time and I thought it is quiet interesting to see how they did the searching and categorized the results visually. “To be or not to be” came out with similar results whether quotation marks were included or not. And Mooter even gave an option to look the phrase in different categories. It did not ignore stop words and rather it considered the search term as a whole as if they were inside invisible quotation marks. However, it did not limit itself to that and continued to look for each words too. This way I didn’t have to do search twice to see the differences in usage of quotation marks.
AlltheWeb.com operates similar to Mooter by not relying on quotation marks very much and not ignoring stop word as much as Google does.
Some search engines ignore stop words while other search engines don’t, and these rather depend a lot more on usage of quotation marks. It is sometimes very convenient but not always. It seems like popular search engines, including Google, tends to pay little attention on importance of stop words. May be it’s because so many people are using it, which in turn causing it to store more sources and information, while lessening search time at the same time.
