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If I search "Menger" or "Menger's", this question will not show within the results: Induction on Menger's theorem by Diestel in Graph Theory

If I search "Induction on Menger's theorem by Diestel in Graph Theory", I get 0 results.

If I search "Diestel", it comes as the first result.

Google search gives it as the first result when searching "induction menger's theorem"

Why is that? I started wondering because it took a bit of effort to find my question, maybe I miss also other results about Menger's theorem?

Should I always search with google, if this is a persistent problem?

I did not use symbols " in searches.

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  • $\begingroup$ Type $$\rm Menger\quad site:math.stackexchange.com$$ into Google and you'll probably get everything you want. $\endgroup$ – Gerry Myerson Feb 17 '13 at 12:28
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    $\begingroup$ I think the problem lies with the single quotation mark in Menger's. It seems that the search mechanism strips out the ' (and any other bits of punctuation) before making the search. So your Menger's is reduced to Mengers. It also seems to be plural-aware so it actually searches on Mengers and Menger which match on the other questions containing Menger but not yours (it only matches on whole words). If you search for "Menger's" in double quotation marks, the stripping of punctuation does not happen and your question is found. $\endgroup$ – Peter Phipps Feb 17 '13 at 15:10
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    $\begingroup$ The SE search function leaves much to be desired, as you've seen. It has proved so poor in my experience that I always use google to search the site, as Gerry suggests. This has the advantage of also searching (many valuable) comments, which SE search does not. $\endgroup$ – Math Gems Feb 17 '13 at 15:46

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