I have to admit that my typing is poor. Rarely do I post an article that doesn’t need at least one correction after it goes live. I am therefore mostly grateful that search engines seek to correct my poor typing by suggesting alternatives.

But there are many, many times that the search engines jump too quickly to the conclusion that I mistyped my query. I am sure that happens to us all.

There is an easy way to fix this which works on both Google and Bing, which is to use the “+” operator before your search. Try typing in “searche” into either engine and you get results for the phrase “search”. Bing, though, is more helpful if you actually WERE looking for results with an “e” on the end, by telling you that it changed the results.

plusoperator

It also lets you rerun the search again without the assumption. When you press that button is adds a “+” symbol to the search phrase and different results appear.

plusoperator2

Infact, Google has the same operator, but it is much harder to find intuitively, so you just have to add it.

plusoperator3

So that’s the tip.

Now did anyone notice the bug in bing’s plus operator search results?


Dixon Jones

An award-winning Search and Internet Marketer. Search Personality of the year Lifetime achievement award Outstanding technology individual of the year International public speaker for 20 years in the field of SEO and Internet Marketing, including: Pubcon; Search Engine Strategies (SMX); Brighton SEO; Ungagged; Search Leeds; State of Search; RIMC and many more.

1 Comment

Barrie · 4th July 2009 at 11:57 am

I came across this site by searching for Dixon Jons…

Leave a Reply

Avatar placeholder

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.