Monday, February 25th, 2008
Google claims that "searches are NOT case sensitive". However, I have empirical evidence to believe otherwise.
I was recently seeing how well a fairly long, extremely specific blog title was indexed by Google. My general thinking has been that niche titles will appear high in search indices when Googled word-for-word. That is, even without surrounding the query in quotation marks, I would expect that a Google search for:
moving maven repository metadata files
…would pull up my blog posting, simply because it matches the title exactly. Here are the surprising results:
As you can see, the upper-case search returns a link to my blog as the second entry. The lower-case search returns a completely different page. To be fair, I recently upgraded my blog from MovableType to WordPress. In doing so, I changed the URL structure. The link that Google found with the capitalized words has a Permanent Redirect (HTTP 301 status code).
What is going on here? I can think of only two possible explanations:
- Google is case sensitive, or at least has recently become so, and their documentation is incorrect.
- Google is not case sensitive. The URL change, regardless of the HTTP 301 Permanent Redirect, has caused the index ranking of the page to change. Perhaps the capitalized version of the query was sent to a server that did not have the updated index.
In either case, the results are confusing. I would expect that a Google search behave as per their documentation. Maybe someone from Google could trackback and let me know 