Google Adds Operator to Search for Synonyms

Google ( http://www.google.com ) has just introduced a new operator to search for synonyms. You use it by adding a tilde -- it looks like ~ and is often found on the key to the left of the 1 on your keyboard -- in front of the keyword for which you want to find synonyms.

Let's do an example, shall we? Of course we shall. Let's take the sample search red roses, no phrase. Simply searching for red roses finds over 973,000 results. Now, let's search for ~red ~roses and find the synonyms for this search. Searching for the synonyms in addition to the keywords would find you more results, right? Well, no. Not in this case. In this case you'll get about 728,00 results when you search for the synonyms in addition to the regular keywords. Perhaps this is because such a result count doesn't take repeats and multiple keywords on one page into effect.

Let's try something else. Search for all the words sour persimmons cousin. You'll see about 271 results. Now let's mix in the synonyms syntax and search for sour ~persimmons cousin. Now we get about 362 results. Here's an example where you did get more results with the syntaxes than without.

Some other notes. It's not clear how the tilde works with phrases. When I search for "good food" I get 612,000 results. When I search for ~"good food", I get 604,000 results. When I search for "~good food" I get 604,000 results. When I search for "good ~food" I get 607,000 results. This is going to take some experimenting.

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