Strange Bolded Letters in Google Sponsored Results
Yesterday, Jon West rang in with a tip about a specific search on Google for variations of the word ecommerce both with personalized web search enabled and disabled. As you may notice, the sponsored results are showing the letter "e" bolded throughout.
I created a screenshot of the result, but you can probably reproduce it. Click for full-size. Basically, all the letter e's, even in the URLs, are bold, but the rest of the letters are not.
Has anyone noticed this?
Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums
Update from Barry: Here is a clearer image, of the sponsored results from the right side of the page. It is easier to see here that the letter "e" is bolded throughout the URL area of the ad. Just look at the green font, and how it gets bold with the letter "e".
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Tamar Weinberg in Google Search Engine at July 9, 2007 8:55 PM
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They might be query expanding certain keywords. ecommerce might get expanded to e-commerce and they treat the '-' as a space or the might break the query into e+commerce. The hit highlighting might be applied to the the expanded query result which includes 'e' and 'commerce'. the same behavior can be seen with a query for U-Haul http://www.google.com/search?q=uhaul
Posted by Jim at July 10, 2007 00:34