Given what I usually write about, I frequently have to search for "popery." Google, however, does not want me to search for popery. Instead, it insists on turning my search into "property"--which, no matter how many interesting real estate links it turns up, does not fulfill my need for whatever no-Popery novel, tract, or poem I'm trying to find. Charles Dickens managed to anticipate this confusion in Barnaby Rudge:
In any event, this evening's search for "popery" proved most frustrating, without or without inappropriate property, as there's apparently no trace of H. Belcher's poetry collection The Portrait of Popery (1861). Not to be confused, mind you, with John Hill's A Portrait of Popery (1834), let alone William Warburton's sermon A Faithful Portrait of Popery (1745). Not only is there no trace of it via Google, aside from a couple of reviews, but it isn't turning up in the British Library catalog, WorldCat, or COPAC. The Bulwark informs me that the "sentiments are excellent" (this being The Bulwark, I'm guessing that's a polite way of saying "rabidly anti-Catholic") and, somewhat alarmingly, that the poet has elected to use the "Spenserian stanza" (which, given the usual standards of Victorian controversial verse, might be an interesting break from tub-thumping iambic pentameter quatrains...but might also be a disaster of near-apocalyptic proportions; experience dictates the latter).
Quotation marks (even around a single word) seem to work for me on German google. E.g. "nam" for 'nam and not name, please'. But Google seems to change how its search fields work (not just their search algorithms) irregularly.
Posted by: nigel holmes | October 16, 2011 at 07:04 AM
Putting things in quotation marks sometimes works...and sometimes doesn't; it seems to depend on whether or not the search triggers whatever algorithm tells Google "hey, shouldn't this person be looking for X?"
Posted by: Miriam | October 16, 2011 at 08:01 AM
Putting a + sign in front of the search term tells Google to search for exactly the search term you typed and not try to second-guess you.
The default Google page I get is the Polish version so I also have to select results "only in English" in "search options", otherwise I get a lot of results from Polish fishing websites ("popery" is the polonized version of "poppers" which are some kind of fishing lure).
Posted by: tatiana.larina | October 16, 2011 at 09:33 AM
Do you ever have a problem with anti-potpourri literature corrupting your searches? (But you probably don't use voice recognition software.)
Posted by: John Holbo | October 17, 2011 at 12:33 AM
Google quietly and nastily changed its search algorithm last week. The + is now only used to refer to things in google+; providing results as if you had mispelled something is now turned on by default (ugh) -- thus property instead of popery, and only quotes around a word or phrase will force the search for that word/phrase as spelled.
It's as if everybody at Google had forgotten the damn thing's origins as a usable academic search engine and decided to provide the anti-search engine instead.
Posted by: Ang Gilham | October 26, 2011 at 12:21 PM