I have been noticing this for a while, so it is not new, but I don't thik we have discussed this before. For clarification, if you search for example for blue round widgets then some of SERP results may look like:

Round widgets are the best
http://www.example.com/some-page
Find the best round widgets etc this is the meta description of this SERP entry.
Missing: blue


The "Missing: blue" will be in the ligh grey colour.

When I see something like this, then if blue was important to me in my search, I would enclose it in quotes to only force the results that have this keyword, e.g. I would search for "blue" round widgets

You really don't know what you are searching for, so we are giving you what we know you really are looking for. :)

You really don't know what you are searching for, so we are giving you what we know you really are looking for.

Or better stated: "You know what you are looking for but look at these results because that will make us more money."

Replicate the same search in Bing that generates the missing notation in Google and you will find many sites that have all of the words on the page. At least Google is being transparent in telling you that they are not displaying what you want. Though it does suggest that the content we create may be worth a hill of beans unless it somehow makes Google some money.

This is why I yelled so loudly when they removed the + search operator. I want to be able to search and force it to use the words I want to search for. But nooooooo.

In the specific search that prompted the post (aakk or someone like her has seen a screenshot, so you know I'm not making this up) there were a reported 6+ million hits-- of which the first "missing" was #5. I just cross-checked in a way I should have done in the first place, by putting word3 (the "missing" one) first in the query. No difference in results.

The part I couldn't understand is that the whole point of adding extra terms to your search is to narrow down the result: not just widgets but blue widgets, not just blue widgets but Bulgarian blue widgets. Every search engine in the world says so on their Search Tips page. Is it possible the computers are now getting tired and would prefer us to go back to single-word searches?

I've noticed many times-- not just recently-- that adding search terms can result in a larger number of purported hits. Are some of them really "missing: word2" results derived from looking only at word1 + word3 instead of the originally attempted word1 + word2?

force it to use the words I want to search for. But nooooooo.

You can force it, but instead of using + operator, you must use quotes around the single word. This replaces what was the + search operator.

For example, when Google had + operator, then we could search:

+blue +round +widgets

Now you can get the same resultset with:

"blue" "round" "widgets"

Putting a single word in quotes replaces + operator.

@lucy, yes I saw your screenshot, try to put the last kw in quotes and the SERP entry with "Missing:" will not be there.

It's not quite the same thing though, aakk. Exact matching what's in the quote marks is not the same thing as requiring that each word be present (in whatever order) That's what pisses me off.

It works for me - for order to be irrelevant, each keyword must be separately enclosed in its own quotes. In this case the order of keywords does not matter.

E.g. "blue" "round" "widgets" to me return all pages that have all three keywords in whatever order, because each was in its own quotation mark (this is different to searching for "blue round widgets" which would return pages with all three keywords in exactly this order).

I admit I haven't tried it recently. But I did try it when they first talked about removing the + operator, and I did not get the same results.

If you say "widgets" in quotes will you still get results for widget, though?