This is the archive site for the pioneering blog CamWorld.com, which is no longer maintained.
Cameron Barrett's personal site can now be found at cameron.barrett.org and his professional site can be found at cameronbarrett.com.

June 09, 2003

Case-Sensitive Search in Google

Doing an ego-search today, I was struck by how many ways people refer to this site:

  • Camworld
  • CamWorld
  • camworld

I realize that I'm somewhat at fault for this inconsistency because over the years I've referred to it myself using all of the above at different times of this weblog's lifespan.

This realization led me to Google's advanced search where I was surprised to discover that they did not offer a case-sensitive search option. Is it simply an oversight?

What search engines do offer this feature and should they? Can you think of scenarios where searching for a word that is capitalized (or not) would provide better results than by treating all text as case-insensitive?

Posted by Cameron Barrett at June 9, 2003 06:35 PM
Comments

AltaVista ( http://www.av.com ) offers case-sensitive search. If you do not use case at all, it is ignored. If you use ANY, it is considered in the search. Search for "three blind mice" vs. "three BLIND mice" and you'll see what I mean.

And sure, I can think of several instances where case-sensitive searching would be helpful. Names with English meanings, like Farmer, could more easily be narrowed down using case-sensitive searching. Searching for stock symbols which also spell words (PETS, YUM) requires additional query words to narrow down results without case-sensitive searching.

That having been said, I favor case-sensitive searching only when it can also be switched off. I think it be too confusing to beginners.


Posted by: ResearchBuzz at June 9, 2003 10:19 PM

I know that many search engines don't consider case unless it's something like "George Bush" - they assume it's a person or proper name you are looking for. Of course this was quite some time ago that I heard this ...


Posted by: Joe Stump at June 10, 2003 01:41 PM

There is a text based way of writing music called "ABC" in which ABCDEFGabcdefga'b'c'd'e'f'g would be a long scale of three octaves.

Searching for tunes written in ABC needs cases sensitivity.

More at the abc homepage


Posted by: Chris at June 11, 2003 04:14 PM

I believe it's definitely not an oversight. Demand for case sensitive search is low (as researchbuzz mentions, it's usually unwanted) yet adding the capability would have quite an impact on either search speed or index size (or both).


Posted by: bamawesifirmware at June 14, 2003 05:48 PM

Only yesterday I was trying to search for the last name "Apana" and all that came up under Google was the acronym "APANA," the Australian Public Access Network Association. I couldn't make the search case sensitive, neither did AltaVista make it case sensitive. I still don't know how to search for the name on the net.


Posted by: at August 27, 2003 02:02 AM

Yep, we in the software industry would use case-sensitive searching on a daily basis. This is a constant annoyance of mine.


Posted by: erik at September 2, 2003 12:56 PM