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.
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Disable automatic stemming by surrounding each term that you want to be matched exactly with quotation marks.
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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 (” ”).
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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
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