I’ve always taught in SEO training sessions that Google queries are case-insensitive. Indeed, Google states this in their online documentation in no uncertain terms:
Google searches are NOT case sensitive. All letters, regardless of how you type them, will be understood as lower case. For example, searches for george washington, George Washington, and gEoRgE wAsHiNgToN will all return the same results.
Yet, as my Netconcepts colleague Chris Smith recently noted, this is not currently the case. We get different results in the 8th position for “george washington” vs. “George Washington” vs. “gEoRgE wAsHiNgToN”, when expanding out the number of listings per page in the Google preferences.
In another example that Chris found, “fossil watches” and “Fossil Watches” returned different results. You can see this in this screenshot:
I found that the new “whois” shortcut query, which returns a domain lookup from domaintools.com as a shortcut at the top of the results, only works if the domain name is entered in lower case. You can see this to be the case in the following screenshot:
Could this be the start of a new era for the SEO industry – an era of case-sensitive rank reporting, case-sensitive keyword research and case-sensitive optimization? God, I hope not!
