This was a question I asked on my blog a few weeks back. The search engine is a big part of the web browsing experience.
In fact, it’s the one place where I have no idea how to spell. For the past few years I’ve searched for a word that I thought up on the fly. There’s a ton of time spent on this, so I don’t know why I bother. But there’s also a lot of time spent wondering if I made the right choice.
I think that the use of capital letters and punctuation makes a big difference in searching. In general, they make it much easier to figure out what the search actually is. I think it can also help with the process of learning what words mean and how to spell them. For example, I know that the word “pizza” is usually spelled “pie”, but that if you type in “pie” in Google’s search bar, you get “pizza”.
Well, I’ll tell you what really bugs me about Google’s search engine: capital letters. I’ve asked people how they spell their name and they usually say “Pizzazz” or “Pizzazz” or “Pie” or something. But if you type in “Pizzazz”, the result is not Pizzazz. It’s pie.
It would seem that capital letters should only be used when the word can be spelled with one. For example, the word pizza is often spelled pie, but that’s when you use capital letters. If the word pie was spelled pie, you would have found the word pizza. Well, it turns out that the capital letters spell pie.
Some people claim that the capital letters spell pie, others that they spell pie. You see the problem? The word pie is spelled pie, meaning it does not have capital letters. Which is why it might even be possible for a search engine bot to spell pie instead of pie.
I can find no evidence that this is true. In fact, I could find no evidence that it is true. But it seems to me that if you spell a word like pie with capital letters and its capital letters spell pie, you would have found the word pie. So that means capital letters spell pie. I could be wrong, but I can’t find any evidence that this is true. I guess the only way is to search for pie and then see if it is spelled with capital letters.
I can’t find any other evidence either. For example, if your search engine bot is on google and you type ‘pie’ into google with capital letters, it will spell pie. However, if you type ‘pie’ with lowercase letters, it will spell pie. But if you type ‘pie’, it will spell pie. No evidence. So I guess the capital letters spell pie. But if you type ‘pie’ with lowercase letters, it won’t spell pie. No evidence.
I don’t know what the evidence is here. There seems to be no statistical connection between capital and lowercase letters. It doesn’t seem to have any effect either.
So I really don’t know what’s going on here. I guess we’re just seeing how google can miss these things.