A friend was looking online for a picture of Mike Myers' Simon character from Saturday Night Live. He was having some trouble finding a largish image so I decided to look for one (and I was curious as to what the Simon character was all about since I'd never seen that skit before).

Here is .

Google is weird. It has these intelligent algorithms for finding out what you want to know by finding your search terms close together (among other ways). So searching for "foo bar" will yield pages with those two words close together.Well, I don't always want that. Every once in a while, I want to see pages which have exactly a certain phrase. I mean, usually Google does a great job finding what I want with its built-in assumptions; it's very smart. But sometimes, I know that I want one word followed by another, as a phrase. Wait -- that's not quite right. Sometimes I want my search terms to be treated like a string, actually, since I don't care about phrases.

For example, say that I want to search for pages that contain the phrase "once in a while". That's a trivial example, I know, but bear with me. If I search Google with the phrase , I get results for pages that have most of those terms. It you click that link, you'll see in faint grey above the search boxes: "The following words are very common and were not included in your search: in a." It certainly speeds up their search algorithms if they automatically discount some common words, but I wanted to see pages which have that exact string of letters in them, no matter how common the search terms might be.

One way to do this is to go to google.com, then click on , then type in your search terms. But I use my nifty Opera Google shortcuts, and so I never see Google's front page. That means to do exact match searching, I have to search once, then search again to see what I want. That's annoying, and so I found a better way.

It hit me one day that since Google will do searches for pages only within certain domains, that must mean that the dot between the parts of the hostname in the search terms were treated specially. I could easily search for only pages within the domain 'working.without.a.net', and Google would have to not throw away the 'a' as being too common. This must mean, therefore, that any regular search terms separated by periods would be treated specially.

So having tried the search for the terms 'once in a while', now try the search when . You'll see that you get no notice saying that your terms were too common. And you also notice that all 100 results on the search page have the exact phrase 'once in a while'.

Although you can easily get the same results by doing an and then entering the search terms in the box labeled 'with the exact phrase', this doesn't fit with my shortcuts. Knowing that periods do the exact same thing, all I need to do for advanced searches is hit F8, then the letter g, then 'mike.myers simon' to get my results. This also works well when you've searched for something and want to narrow it down, too. You can just tab up to the search terms box and add periods where necessary and hit return.

One more note: although you might think you can do the same thing with quotes, I've noticed subtle differences. I can't come up with an example right now, but I used to use double quotes to denote phrases (this was what AltaVista used), and I saw that I got slightly different results that way. I think it's because Google might cache certain search terms. It also might treat double quoted search items as phrases and not exact strings. I'm not sure. I do know that I get better results with periods than with quotes.