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Google has been testing a new search algorithm, where searches with This Type of Capitalization, THIS TYPE OF CAPITALIZATION, and no capitalization return different results.
I’ve been testing it, and with some searches I get the same results, but with other I get vastly different results. Try it out for yourself and see what happens.
For the life of me I can’t figure out the reasoning behind this. As we all know, some people type in caps all the time and many don’t capitalize at all, especially in searches. Why does Google see fit to offer different results? What is the point?
If Google decides to utilize this new twist on a regular basis, it will make SEO even crazier than it’s already become - or at least make me crazier.
I’d love to hear what you think of this strange search development.
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15 Comments
I would have no idea why this would be done except to confuse the experts. Your blogging has slowed down recently but glad to see you are at it again. eric
@Eric - you know, maybe that’s why - just to make it a little more difficult for SEO, as if finding links isn’t hard enough these days! But I suppose Google wants to not only keep it interesting for us but make sure we have plenty to do - so we can keep our jobs.
Yes, I’ve slowed down a bit - real life gets in the way of my virtual life sometimes, but I enjoy blogging and also my readers’ comments. Well, except for Mr. Weekly Blog Roundup, who seems to have a chip on his shoulder.
Thank you for the post. I tested it and in many cases the first 3 sites were the same but the 4th sites and lower were different. Very interesting but I doubt seriously if anyone would use all caps.
I noticed that trulia and the yahoo pages have the caps but they also have the content. What do you make of that?
hey you are right
I also tested it
Dunno why google has made so..?
Great, just one more thing to be concerned with now as we optimize our blogs. Thanks for sharing!
I don’t see why it’d be a very useful feature. The beginning of each word in a phrase would be useful since it could signify a title, but I don’t see why having every letter in caps matters.
That is really unnecessary. It does not change the keyword a searcher is searching for? Well, I’d prefer this would not happen, it’s only extra work.
The only thing I could think of is disambiguation. Try searching for ‘apple’ on Google and the first result is Apple Inc, try it on Wikipedia and it returns an article about the fruit.
It might make sense that lowercase ‘apple’ returns something different than ‘Apple’, but I’m not sure users search that way.
How about searching for ‘RAN’ when you want the Rainforest Action Network? I’m sure there are better examples. Either way, it still remains to be seen if users will actually search like that.
@George - a certain number of people use all caps in everything they type. It’s considered shouting be they don’t seem to understand that.
@Bonita Springs - I’m not sure what you mean.
@JBourne - me neither.
@Stefan - that’s pretty much how I feel, too.
@ Robert - I like your ‘Apple’ example; that makes sense, but it doesn’t affect the search like it should if Google was using the concept correctly.
I used to be so correct when using capitalization, but I’ve slipped into the Internet mode of using mostly lower case the majority of the time.
I think that this is just another simple development that search engines have come up with. Most of S.E.O in my opinion is just down to common sense and accessibility.
It makes a lot of sense, as the Apple/apple example illustrates. In fact as far as SEO is concerned it makes things easier in some ways as you can target your efforts more precisely when optimising for brands rather than product types which might share a common name. The problem though is that people have become used to searches not being case sensitive. Still it’s something to keep in mind.
@Martn - thanks for your comment. Much of SEO is common sense.
@Lightning Bug - good points! Perhaps in the future people will be more aware of case sensitive searches, but it’s just too easy to become lazy and type in lower case all the time.
Here’s a new blog post on this subject: I’m pretty sure you want potatoes.
Isn’t that crazy?! I’ve noticed the very same thing when I type keywords in Google differently. Some of the time, search results will be fairly the same but other times, capitlizing words (i.e. city name) for some searches has returned very different results.
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