In my last post I pointed out how Google queries for a word, and that same word I quotes return different results. I further pointed out that the word in quotes returns more results than without them, and how this makes no sense from an IR standpoint.
Since then I've compared this behavior to other search engines. Live search treats a word, and that word in quotes as exactly the same query (which makes sense). Ask.com returns the same number of results but ranks then differently. Yahoo returns more results for the item outside of quotes, possibly because the word outside of quotes is being matched with anything containing that stem. I used common words like food, and car for my test searches.
I still have no idea why Google is matching more terms to a word in quotes than that word without quotes.
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Ive been checking around on this too. No one else seems to focus on the single word issue though.
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