Interpreting

Results

64% 64% Google
...using Google More Google! Copyright 1999 Google Inc....
www.google.com/ Cached 1k No Phrase Match

The red (or purple) bar

The red bar, along with the percentage next to it, is the result's PageRank. (The bar is purple for subsequent results from the same website.) The PageRank is a measure of the "importance" of a page; a result has high PageRank if lots of other pages with high PageRank point to it. The PageRank of a page does not depend on the query you've entered, but is instead a property of the page itself.

The PageRank is computed automatically; we have no control over the PageRank of specific pages.

The text after the red bar

Next to the PageRank is the title of the result document. Sometimes, instead of a title there will be a URL. This means that we have not yet indexed the web page we're returning, so we don't know its title. We still know it's a good match, though, because of other web pages -- which we have indexed -- that have links to the returned page. If the text associated with these links matches your query, we may return the page as a result even though it has not been indexed.

The text below the title

This text is a summary of the result page. The text returned is not necessarily the first text on the page, but instead is an excerpt of the page that includes one or more of your query terms.

In order to keep the results a reasonable size, we only show a few excerpts from the result page. We include the text (xx more) if there are more excerpts containing the query terms.

The last line

The last line has several components. The first one is typically the URL of the result page, in green. If the URL was shown on the first line (instead of the title), it is omitted here.

After the URL is a Cached link. If you click on this you will see the contents of the web page as of the time we indexed it. For web sites with fast-changing content, such as news sites, the current contents of a web page may not be a good match for your query. The cached content is the content Google! used to judge this page a good match for your query.

The cache link will be missing for sites that have not been indexed, as well as for sites whose owners have asked us to remove the cached content.

If you click on the cache link, the resulting page will have some HTTP header information at the top. This is a feature, not a bug! The information may be interesting in itself -- the dates can tell you how old the cached content is -- but more importantly it reminds you you are looking at a cached version of the page and not the page itself.

The next number on the line is the size of the web page. It is omitted for sites we have not yet indexed.

Finally, for queries with more than one word in them, there will be an indication Phrase Match, Partial Phrase Match, or No Phrase Match at the end of the line. A "Phrase Match" means all the query words occur next to each other somewhere in the document. A "Partial Phrase Match" means some, but not all, of the words can be found next to each other. "No Phrase Match" means no query words are adjacent.

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