Google has just updated its search engine by improving the use of keywords in quotes. From now on, the results pages will highlight the section of the sites containing the exact expressions and quotes.
In the field of Internet research, Google largely dominates its competitors such as Yahoo, Bing, Qwant or DuckDuckGo. And to stay ahead, the web giant regularly updates its algorithms while quietly adding new functions to its engine. This is the case of a small improvement unveiled in a blog post Thursday, August 4, 2022, which is about searching for phrases and quotes. Indeed, it has always been enough to put words, names or a sentence between quotation marks – for example, “how does it work” – to display in results only the pages which contain the exact expression. A very practical option to refine a search that gives too many irrelevant results or to find the exact source of a quote in an article. Now it’s easier to find a citation in Google. By typing a quotation surrounded by quotation marks, the engine directly highlights the places on the site where it is written.
Google improves its citation search function
It’s a tiny improvement – which most users probably won’t notice – but has the merit of making it easier to find. Before, Google actually showed you results that actually included the quoted word or phrase. However, the small excerpt in the description does not indicate where exactly the sentence is. Previews now show directly where the quote is written, which is displayed in bold. You can then identify it more easily where to find it after clicking on the link and visiting the content. Best of all, you don’t have to open a site and search through it to find it, since you can see it without even entering it. Engineer Yonghao Jin explains that this new tool was implemented after many requests from users.
However, Google hesitated a lot before putting this function in place because everything is not perfect, and some caveats are in order. Some quotes are present on a site, but not directly visible on the page. This is particularly the case when the algorithm digs into the metadata of the web page, such as the description of an image or the URL for example. Similarly, the page may have been modified since Google’s last visit and no longer contain the quote. Punctuation is also considered spaces, which sometimes changes the search. Finally, the feature does not work for mobile searches, or for special modes like image or news search. However, it is this kind of small improvement that allows Google to stay at the top of the search engines.