Zmarties

Slashdot picked up on the news that Google has raised the permitted number of words in a query from 10 to 32 words.

By avoiding being posted on the Slashdot front page, only appearing in the dedicated Google category, the news was greeted by a mere 50 comments (compared to the order of magnitude greater number a front page article can expect), but that also means that those comments are generally of a higher quality.

Amongst the interesting posts are comments which note:

• you can now add more site: restrictors to your search OR'd together to get results from a restricted set of sites
• a good tutorial example about using synonyms OR'd together (but avoiding homonyms) to search for very targetted results
• selecting a longer block of text (general quotations, or the full text of error messages) is now far more convenient, rather than having to resort to the workaround of using the * wildcard word operator

Other comments I've seen around on blogs etc include

• Some foreign language sites have not moved to the higher limits (France in particular was noted for retaining the 10 word limit for now on some queries).
• This is great news for "uber" engines, which add hidden phrases to the user's entered query in order to target it
• Its useful when tracking down what Google thinks are synonyms of words

It's also worth noting that the word OR (or the | symbol which is equivalent) which as you might expect does a boolean OR query rather than the default AND query, do not count towards this limit.