Google returns pages that match variants of your search terms.

The query above finds pages that contain words that are similar to some or all of your search terms, e.g.,

• “child,” “children,” or “children’s”
• “bicycle,” “bicycles,” “bicycle’s,” “bicycling,” or “bicyclists”
• “helmet” or “helmets”

Google calls this feature word variations or automatic stemming.

• Want only Exact Matches?

  Disable automatic stemming by preceding each term that you want to be matched exactly with the + operator.

• Searching for a Phrase or a Proper Name?

  If you want to search for pages that contain a phrase or proper name and not variations, enclose your search terms in quotes (” ”).

• One Word, Two Words, or Hyphenated?

  When Google encounters a hyphen (–) in a query term, e.g., [ e-mail ], it searches for:

  • the term with the hyphen, e.g., e-mail
  • the term without the hyphen, e.g., email
  • the term with the hyphen replaced by a space, e.g., e mail
  • [ e-mail ] matches “e-mail,” “e mail,” and “email”
  • [ e mail ] matches “e-mail” and “e mail”

  If you aren’t sure whether a word is hyphenated, search for it with a hyphen.

tags (keywords): favorite, hyphen, narrowing search, phrase, word variations