How do I write a search page?

Why do the "verbatim search" feature in Google often produce many more hits than a "plain" simple search?

• 1) I always thought that searching on "read" would force Google to search for that set of four letters exactly. {And this search yields 6.74 billion hits} But Google help seems to imply now that "read" (or perhaps only when quote marks are omitted) includes conjugated forms?????? 2) But if I go down to the bottom of the left side-column of the results page and click on VERBATIM, I get 25.27 billion hits ! SO I AM COMPLETELY BAFFLED! (And if the feature that expands "read" to related derived forms such as read/reads/reading/reader/readers [???] have some way to tell you the entire list of forms it is using? The documentation is quite ambiguous.) How could a "verbatim search" for "read" produce FOUR TIMES AS MANY HITS as what would presumably be a more "general" search for the word (which Google seems to say causes conjugated forms like read/reads/reading/reader/readers, and perhaps the past tense strong verb irregular verb complications of "wrote" when dealing with "write"???)

• Answer:

  We are used to Google being perfect, so when it doesn't seem to work perfectly, it can send people crazy. It could be a genuine bug in the way it's searching, or alternatively in way it shows the results count. The other possibility is that by using verbatim you are bypassing any intelligent filters that are used to return more relevant results or to avoid duplicates and search engine spam, so these are included and increase the results count. In any case "read" is not the same as [verbatim] read which is how Google seem to explain it, but nor is it the same as simply 'read', I have tried all three and the actual results you get are different, and so are the number of results. "read" may differ form [verbatim] read in that "read" states that the exact phrase must be included in the document returned, whilst [verbatim] read might show pages that link to or from another page containing the exact phrase 'read' (this is already the case with a standard search for 'read'; the result may not actually contain the word or even a directly related word at all). This is all quite confusing, especially when Google don't seem to have provided any information about it other than to imply that using the verbatim button is the same as using quotation marks, which is clearly not the case. I think it is a genuine error either in the way Google have explained it, or in the actual implementation of the feature. It does give an interesting insight about how complex Google's search algorithms really are though!