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Tuesday we reported that Google quietly dropped the ~tilde operator due to lack of use.
The operator helped searches find synonymous, a form of expanding your query. It was primarily used by librarians and also SEMs looking for keyword research ideas.
Google's head of search spam, expanded on why Google dropped the feature. Matt Cutts said on Twitter that yes, it wasn't used much at all by real searchers and by removing the operator it take up less "indexing space" Google "could use for more pages."
Here is Matt Cutts tweet:
@Go_Marcus @DatGuyGabe librarians too. But the feature didn't get much usage at all, yet took up indexing space we could use for more pages.
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) June 27, 2013
What would you prefer? More of your pages indexed or the ~tilde operator? Why not both? ;-)
Forum discussion at Twitter.
