What are the search limitations of Google? [Archive]

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brawnypandora0

March 9th, 2011, 05:59 AM

earthpigg

March 9th, 2011, 07:36 AM

Google or any other search engine, is unable to search for data on sites like a school's WebCT system, which requires login. Will this always be the case in the future?

Are there any other search limitations?

google searches the public world wide web.

your school's webct system is not on the world wide web, it's on the do-i-have-a-login-web.

google also can't search your yahoo account's inbox. because that isn't on the world wide web, either, it's on the brawnypandora0-and-yahoo-web.

the pattern continues. if the world can see it, google can see it. if the world cannot, google cannot.

nerdopolis

March 9th, 2011, 01:06 PM

You can't search for special characters (like the [ command) and I don't think it can be set to be case sensitive

Lucradia

March 9th, 2011, 01:09 PM

You can't search for special characters (like the [ command) and I don't think it can be set to be case sensitive

Put it in quotes. Although that normally would work, Google still only searches words.

Paqman

March 9th, 2011, 01:57 PM

Google also won't index anything that's been specifically excluded by the site's owner. Same with other search engines.

Lucradia

March 9th, 2011, 01:59 PM

Google also won't index anything that's been specifically excluded by the site's owner. Same with other search engines.

Do you know the HTML that restricts that? Or is it only attainable via robots.txt?

Paqman

March 9th, 2011, 02:06 PM

Do you know the HTML that restricts that? Or is it only attainable via robots.txt?

You can do either:

robots.txt (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35302)
HTML (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93710&from=61050&rd=1)