Google has finally upgraded from the previous search limit of 10 words to 32, and it’s about time. Many other major search engines (Yahoo, Jeeves, MSN), have never even had limits on the number of search words. To the average Joe, this will not affect his searching style. Most people find what they need with well under 10 search words, but there are some exceptions for needing to expand the limit.

For example, searching for song lyrics or quotes from text could easily get over 10 words. Another would be if you use Google’s API you probably run into the problem of exceeding the limit when you automate tasks. If you really wanted to you could get around the pesky limitation there were tricks you could use, but none of them worked quite right and all had their limitations and pitfalls.

Expanding the limit to 30 words is a major step in the right direction, and Gary Price at the SearchEngineWatch.com blog thinks there are some other changes Google could make to optimize the searching experience. Here’s an excerpt of Gary’s article.

With this change (good news and a long time coming) I think advanced searchers would now like to see Google offer (nested)(searching), remove the 101kb page cutoff, offer truncation, and be more precise about what backlinks they do and do not show. Oh yes, how could I forget, offer a proximity operator. As of today, Exalead is the only web engine to offer one. AltaVista used to make one available.

Let’s hope that Google keeps taking these steps in the right direction for improving their search engine by adding more features like the ones Gary has suggested.
Do you have any features that you would like to see added to Google? If so, be sure to drop me a line.