New Google Syntax for Number Range

Yes, yes, I know Google's offering some new search services, I'll talk about those tomorrow. Today I want to talk about a new syntax Google's offering: number range.

The number range syntax works by inputting two numbers, with a double period between them. The syntax will find any number in the stated range, like so:

revolution 1776..1781

This'll find the keyword "revolution" and any numbers between 1776 and 1781, which is nice for historical research. It seems not to work well in title searches unless it's part of an allintitle:

allintitle:revolution 1776..1779

(when I tried revolution intitle:1776..1779 it found only phrase results for "1776-1779".)

There also seems to be some recognition of special characters going on here. The search:

revolution $1776..$1779

Finds a very limited number of results with numbers which do contain dollar signs. Does this mean that Google is now recognizing special characters? Apparently so, to a limited extent;
search for $10 and you'll get very different results (including highlighted $ signs) than if you just searched for 10. But searching for 10%, "open.window", etc. Do not find changed search results. (Strangely enough, searching for thr and thr* did not change the search result count, but *did change the order of the search results.* Wonder what that means?)

Does this new syntax extend across the range of Google's services? Unfortunately no; searching Google News for revolution 1776..1781 generated the error '"numrange:1776-1779" is a very common word and was not included in your search.' And for images search I got the error "1776..1781 was dropped from your search because it is not supported for this type of search."
Froogle generates no error messages but searching for revolution with and without the number range generated the same search results.

Posted to Search Engines-Google | TrackBack