I've noticed in the last couple of days that google has changed the results for certain keywords that have an apostrophe. A fictional keyword example might be "O'Leary". We were (and still are, in other search engines) doing quite well for "Oleary products" because it seems that no one remembers to type the apostrophe. However late last week we disappeared from the index entirely for "Oleary". Today (monday) we're showing up even better than our previous "Oleary" results for "O'Leary", something we'd never shown up for before. Also the search results for "Oleary went from 800-900 results to ~150 results (results for "O'Leary stayed roughly the same). Obviously nothing changed on our side (page optimization, anchor text, page titles, etc.), which means Google changed how it parses and relates these searches. Does anyone know if this was a system-wide change relating to apostrophed words, or if it was a specific tweak within certain segments?
I think only Google know how this one works. They have their algo about it and they do not usually disclose info like these on their algo.