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Google Starts Auto Stemming Searches

Since the most recent Google Dance started around Nov. 15, this update of the Google database nicknamed Florida has created quite a stir in the ecommerce Webmaster community. The major complaint has been the significant change in the ranking of results and many pages no longer show up in the top of the search engine results. For those with time, read the thousands of postings about it in the Update Florida discussions at WebmasterWorld.

Certainly, the ranking changes will also have an impact on searchers, but even more significant to me is the experimentation that Google is now doing with automatic stemming. Discovered first in the Cre8asiteforums, Google changed its Basic Help page to announce that it is now using stemming.

Basically, Google now takes search terms and looks for grammatical variants of SOME of them. Unfortunately, Google does not make it clear which terms it stems and which it does not. I found no plural or singular variants but did find some examples of verb variants. For example, a search on drink water matches pages with 'drinking' and 'water' while run linux also finds 'running.'

You may be able to identify when it happens by looking for the highlighted terms in the search results, but it is not always obvious when this occurs especially if the hits do not rank high enough to appear on the first page. The stemming does not seem to occur on single word searches or on phrase searches (yet another reason to use quotes for phrase searching whenever possible).

Does this help relevance? Maybe for some searches and searchers, but for precision searching it can also be frustrating. Plus, the searcher is not given the choice of when to use it and when to turn it off. MSN Search has offered a stemming check box on its advanced search page for years. Since Google does not say when they will turn on the stemming and when they do not, they could at least give searchers the choice of when to use it (at least for those of us that use features like the preferences and advanced search options).