

Dashes vs. underscores - Garbage
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/

======
pluies
Interestingly enough, the example from the post doesn't work anymore:

[http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=_maxint](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=_maxint)

Gives "Showing results for MAXINT. Search instead for _MAXINT." Clicking on
the second link still searches for MAXINT. You have to use +_MAXINT as the
search query for the search to work (and it's not even case-sensitive).

Maybe Google treats underscores the same way as hyphens now that it's
mainstream and the majority of people don't really care about the semantic
distinction between the two? The post is 6 years old after all.

~~~
Dylan16807
Google's precision has been going downhill. Even adding + isn't enough
anymore. Try searching for the phrase "everything wrong" in quotes. Google
will insist on including "everything's wrong" no matter how many + symbols you
sprinkle around. If you exacerbate the problem with [["everything wrong"
crossfade]] you get 36 thousand results to bing's accurate 64.

------
lancefisher
This article is interesting, but it's really old (2005). There has been
discussion about it since then.

Here is an article from 2007 on Matt's blog:
[http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/whitehat-seo-tips-for-
bloggers...](http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/whitehat-seo-tips-for-bloggers/) It
says, at that time, Google was looking into making underscores word
separators.

Later, in 2009, Matt mentioned in a Google Webmaster Help video that he'd
still recommend dashes if you can, but don't worry about it if underscores are
working for you. They might still get around to making underscores separators:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3SFVfDIS5k>

As of 6/20/2011, Google still recommended using Dashes in URLs here:
[http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answe...](http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=76329)

------
code_duck
I wonder if this is still accurate. Google has changed a huge amount in the
past 6 years. These days, I notice a lot of important punctuation (along with
entire words, intentional spellings of words, etc) are ignored by Google in
search strings.

~~~
brudgers
Google will even ignore terms in quotation marks these days.

~~~
code_duck
Google completely ignores single quotes, but strings enclosed in double quotes
are searched for about as I'd expect.... minus the punctuation.

For instance, search for a phrase like

    
    
        'imag' leader
    

You get "Showing results for 'image' leader. Search instead for 'imag'
leader."

Change them to double quotes, and it actually finds "imag". Google suggests
"Did you mean: "image" leader", but does not automatically change the search
as in the other instance.

However, search for something like "image.url", and it is the same as
searching for "image url" (not imageurl). Google appears to replace the '.'
with a space.

------
brudgers
The reason not to use underscores is because people don't understand them. I
learned this the hard way back in the late nineties the first time I set up an
email account for a business. I chose _yyy_ _architects@emailhost.com instead
of using a dash because of the connotations the underscore carried regarding
computer programming conventions. Then I enjoyed the opportunity to explain
over the phone exactly which key was required to correctly type our email
address many many times. [Stylized conversation]

    
    
       It's an underscore not a dash
       Huh?
       It's the the same key as the dash, only hold shift.
       Huh?
       See the dash key?
       Yeh.
       Just hold shift when you press it.
       Huh?
       Do you have our fax number?
    

That's why you don't use underscores in a URL. Of course, today nobody uses
dashes either if they can help it.

~~~
burgerbrain
I remember seeing news broadcasters in the 90s that didn't know how to
pronounce the '@' symbol. So while I find your story all too plausible, I have
a hard time believing that people still don't know how to type an '_'.

~~~
brudgers
How do most people underline text on the computer?

Outside of programming, how often do you use the underscore key?

~~~
burgerbrain
I suggest that there are fewer people in this world that 1) know how to use a
search engine, and 2) are incapable of examining their nice silkscreen printed
keyboards, than you suspect. There is a world of difference between "uses it"
and "capable of figuring out how to use it".

------
dexen
tl;dr:

dashes separate words, underscore is word character -- in common
interpretation by, for example, Google Search.

When implementing any text search or matching, there's matter of what
constitues word boundary. Obviously whitespace does, as do some punctuation;
but exactly which punctuation should be considered word boundary? There is an
document on the subject by Unicode Consortium:
<http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr29/>

There is one important case where punctuation and whitespace do not constitue
word boundary: the hyphen, as used for breaking word in hyphenation. In
Unicode, U+2010 Hyphen, U+2011 Non-breaking hyphen and U+002D (Hyphen-minus,
the usual `minus' character from keyboard, for backward compatibility with
ASCII / ISO8859-*)

~~~
patio11
_Obviously whitespace does_

This has been the beginning of many hilarious conversations. (My first love
was natural language processing. My second was Japanese, which treats every
whitespace as a tragic waste of a place where you could have fit twenty three
strokes.)

------
Zakuzaa
Article dated August 25th, 2005.

------
ScottBurson
I think the bigger problem is that most people don't know that dashes (or
underscores) are even allowed in domain names. Thus we get domains like
"penisland.com" for a company called Pen Island. Short of that kind of
problem, multi-word names with no dashes are just hard to read.

So remember, the next time you go to register a multi-word domain name, use
dashes!

~~~
fferen
Note that "penisland.net" (what you probably meant, since "penisland.com"
redirects to something else) is a joke site making fun of the ambiguity in the
name. And I personally don't find them harder to read, and they're easier to
explain by mouth. I don't remember the last time I've seen dashes in a multi-
word domain.

------
thurn
I guess Google didn't have any lisp programmers in the early days!

------
thezilch
There have been articles, on Google's Analytics-Support page(s), that have
recommended otherwise or have made not that underscores are just the same.
Some of those old links no longer work -- answer (id) expired, but the
following still has language in support of underscores:
[http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?...](http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=66982)

------
roryokane
I was hoping this would be serious study on whether dash-style or
underscore_style is better for variable names in code. Such a study would
analyze readability, ease of typing, and any other relevant factors. Too bad
this article isn’t such a study, while the information it does impart is out-
of-date.

~~~
pbreit
Dashes in code variables seems pretty rare. Disallowed even in Python.

------
hm2k
There's been massive advancements and updates since this was written in 2005
so don't expect this to be gospel.

------
chopsueyar
The answer is the article URL.

~~~
eam
Which is in Matt Cutt's URL --> <http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-
underscores/> so the answer is dashes.

