Google limitind search queries?

This is what you get when your search contains more than 10 words:

"ten" (and any subsequent words) was ignored because we limit queries to 10 words."

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...ree+four+five+six+seven+eight+nine+ten+eleven

What is this about? Has this been about long? I cannot remember ever seeing this before....

 

First i've seen of that...

Saying that, I don't often do 10 word search queries.

 

Unless you enclose the phrase in quotes, with that number of words, you wouldn't get a relevant set of results returned anyway.

 

Its been around for a while.

I noticed quite a while ago that every search is limited to ten words. It counts stop words (as, the, if, etc) in that ten also. Basically a search for a 11 word phrase will be clipped down do a 10 word phrase (the first ten words).

 

I noticed it the first time i searched for something over ten words - about 5 months ago - i presumed as hergo says it has been around for a while.

 

Spoke to my Brother about it... He said that it has been doing it for as long as he has been using G - A good few years now.

 

Recently, I ran a 15 odd word search with quotes, and after that, I had site:siteURL. Not just did it truncate after 10 words, but also, it ignored the site:siteURL instruction. So, it seems to be blindly truncating the entire input and just not parsing the entire string.
Ajeet

 

Guess when Google says

that is what they mean.

 

I guess The point I was making was more that:

site:siteURL "11 word query string" would honor the site: command
but site:siteURL "11 word query string" would ignore the site: bit

Have Fun
Ajeet

 

As long as the site:siteURL was within the first 10 words it would honour it.

It must be the 10th word or less.