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Why is the @ character ignored in search queries?

 
 

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Abstract Abstract

Question: “Why is the @ character ignored in search queries?”

Answer: because Google does not want to index email-addresses. This is so that no one can scrape Google for easy access to lots and lots of email-addresses. The future might hold something else, but at present it will not change.

0:00
Atul Arora from Fremont, California asks: “Any reason why Google search does not treat the @-sign differently given the rise of Twitter? For example @mattcutts and mattcutts give me the same results.”.

0:13
Well historically that was a deliberate choice because we didn't want to index email-addresses; at least I think it was a deliberate choice. You don't want somebody scraping Google to find a bunch of email-addresses. So it was kind of nice not to index the @-sign.

0:27
It depends. I could imagine us, over time, starting to treat that differently but at least for the time being, that hasn't been as popular or a request that we've heard enough that we would probably put resources into it right now.