I use Advanced Web Ranking. It does a great job of taking care of the necessary evil of rank monitoring. It runs automatically, has very easy set up, and emulates human search for us unfortunates without a SOAP API. I was checking some site rankings the other day and noticed that a few of our sites had completely dropped from MSN. Investigating manually, I saw some interesting results for "st. augustine weddings".

Results are included for saint saint saint? They are? Well, congratulations, Live Search, you can correctly interpret that st. means saint. However, unless I click on "show just the results for st. augustine weddings," the results are completely irrelevant. A search for St. Augustine was normal, however. Searches for Ft. Meyers plus a term revealed the same anomaly. Searches for Mount St Helens versus Mount Saint Helens were the same, but putting Mount St. Helens gave very different results, many of which were completely irrelevant. That made me realize that the period was the issue.

I type punctuation out of habit, as I'm sure many many searchers do. Now, I know that Google doesn't, and I thought the other engines didn't register punctuation in the same way they aren't supposed to account for case sensitivity. But the searches I did seemed to say otherwise...

It appears that the period sort of ends what Live Search considers to be the important part of the query. The word search appears in the description of a few of the results, but it almost looks like all we did was search for the word "period." These results, however, are not similar to the results for the word period alone. 

This post and my last post may lead people to believe that I'm a niggling SERP addict, not accounting for the thousands of daily anomalies that plague every search engine, but when clients are relying on traffic from certain terms that I've worked hard to rank well for and something like this is occuring, it does bother me (though it's Live Search and not Google, so it bothers me significantly less). I first noticed this last Friday and wrote it off. It's persisting and I wanted to see what all of you in mozland had to say. You offered such fascinating conjectures on the case sensitivity I issue I explored recently. Thanks!