Capitalization Does Affect Results When Searching Google

Written by: Tom · June 16, 2008 at 4:30 pm · Category: Search Tips 

Many people take longer to type in their searches because they worry about capitalizing people’s names and names of places. However, does Google care if you capitalize words when searching? More importantly, will it affect your search results?

Google, Inc. says the following regarding this topic:

Google searches are NOT case sensitive. All letters, regardless of how you type them, will be understood as lower case. For example, searches for george washington, George Washington, and gEoRgE wAsHiNgToN will all return the same results.

I have always assumed that this was true. However, I found out today that capitalization actually does make a difference in Google search results.

Don’t worry though, it’s really not a very drastic difference. Actually, it’s not even a difference you really will notice unless you dig really deep into the search results.

Take a look at the three screen shots below which show the results of a Google search using variations of capital and lowercase letters with the keywords: using capital letters.

All Lowercase Letters in a Google Search

Capital Letters in a Google Search

Mixing Capital and Lowercase Letters in Google Searches

You may not notice much difference in the first five search results that Google returns, however upon closer inspection, you will notice that Google returns different amounts of search results depending on how you type in the keywords. Here is a summary:

  • The Phrase using capital letters returned 390,000 results.
  • The Phrase USING CAPITAL LETTERS returned 392,000 results.
  • The Phrase uSiNg cApItAl lEtTeRs returned 377,000 results.

Fortunately for the search we performed, it doesn’t seem to alter the first few pages of search results that are obtained. However in some cases, like this one where a webmaster reports that his site ranks six spots lower when Googlers type in a lowercase keyword, it can alter the results significantly.

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Comments

2 Responses to “Capitalization Does Affect Results When Searching Google”

  1. Mike H. on June 20th, 2008 9:53 am

    Nice post Tom! Search Engine Land just talked about this this morning, and they offer a few more details on the case sensitivity of Google’s search.

    Also, an employee of Google admits that Google now does return different results depending on the case of the query submitted.

    You can read it here: http://searchengineland.com/080620-081736.php

  2. Tom on June 21st, 2008 2:36 pm

    Thanks for the reply, Mike. That really is some good information.

    I guess Google is just always tweaking their search algorithm to get better results. I’m just not sure what the case sensitivity has to do with it, though.

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