Long Word Searching Showdown

Showdown last updated March 5, 2005.
by Greg R. Notess

There are some very long words in English and other languages, not to mention place names. For examples, see the Long Words page for words ranging from 21 characters to over 300 along with notes and sources for those words. The search engines have some limits as to how long a word they will search. This table shows the search engines, in descending order of the ones that can find the longest words. And no, this is not a terribly significant showdown. I just found it interesting.

+ Gigablast Best for Long Word Searching
+ WiseNut Gets Honorable Mention

	Longest Word Search	Result of Searching a Longer Word
Gigablast	No limit? Found 1896 letter word	Anyone have a longer one?
WiseNut	Searches first 31 characters	Any longer query is treated as a truncated query, which is quite effective at finding pages with the word or a close variant.
MSN Search	Found 155, but not 310	"This site is temporarily unavailable, please check back soon"
Yahoo! Search	Found 155, but not 310	No matches
Google	Found 100, but not 155	". . . is too long a word. Try using a shorter word."
Ask Jeeves/Teoma	41 letters	No matches
Exalead	36 letters	No matches

Methodology

Searched progressively longer words at each of the search engines
When the search engine responded with a No Matches, I then verified that a page containing the query word was in the search engine's database by searching for it using phrases occurring on the page.

Specific Search Engine Notes:

Certainly, Gigablast wins this showdown since it appears to have no limit to the size word it can search and retrieve from its database. The nearly 1,900 character word was found on this page, and it starts with methionylglut. . . (yes, that page says it is 1909 characters long, but both of my word processor counters only counted 1,896 characters).

WiseNut gets an honorable mention for its shortcut. While it doesn't really search terms longer than 31 characters, instead WiseNut truncates the search and just matches on the first 31 characters.

MSN Search has the most unrelated error message, but the rest just give the same error message as if no results could be found, even though they all had pages in their databases that contained the query word.

One strange happening at Google, is that even though it could not find the 155 character word that does occur on pages in its database, it did say that it found two news results, as the screenshot shows. Of course, neither news story actually contained the word or anything close to it. I have no idea why those two news results showed up. Later on the same day, I tried the search again. This time, three news results appeared, but completely different than the first two.