dlowan wrote:
Thank you again......but I do think mebbe I could have tried "versus" when "vs" didn't get what I wanted??? :wink:
Sure, trying it every which way might have gotten you somewhere but I expect search engines to not be that pedantic and so do they. It's really an issue of the fact that search engines are still in the dark ages in technology if you search for anything not text-based.
Here's an example of the right way to do it on their regular web search:
http://www.google.com/search?q=male%20vs%20female
http://www.google.com/search?q=male%20versus%20female
The results are only slightly different, and the first result is the same on both queries (note that each search you run might hit a different index so what you see may vary).
Actually, I just learned something: If you dig in a bit more you'll notice that even so, they didn't stem vs to versus but they do stem versus to vs.
You can tell what they are stemming by the search term highlighting on the results. When you search for "vs" they don't highlight "versus".
For somewhat obvious linguistic reasons that actually makes sense, so what I just learned is that it's probably better to always spell out "versus" in searches (but I maintain that you should not have to do both queries if the search engine is competent).