Do search engines treat hyphens as spaces?

This test will seek to determine if search engines treat hyphens (-) as spaces.

Testing Methodology

This page contains several instances of the string AISEF-Dashes-As-Spaces.

If the search engine treats hyphens as spaces, the text AISEF-Dashes-As-Spaces will show up in the search results when you search for that string with spaces instead of hyphens.

Evaluation Methodology

Replace the hyphens in the test string with spaces.

Search for the revised test string in the search engines.

Search Engine	Expected Result
Google	Yes
Yahoo	Unknown
MSN	Unknown
AltaVista	Unknown
AllTheWeb	Unknown

If the search engine treats hyphens as spaces, the text AISEF-Dashes-As-Spaces will show up in the search results when you search for that string with spaces instead of hyphens.

Caveats

This page was put online on 24 April, 2004. It will take some time for each search engine to crawl and index this page to make this test "live."

A malicious person could link to this page using the unique string in the title tag as link text. This would force a false positive on most search engines and invalidate the test results.

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