"Casey Wilson" wrote in message
.. .
This is getting off topic, but strange. I entered China+"general
aviation" into Google and got zero hits. When I changed the order to
"general aviation"+China, Google came back with 26,300 hits. I never knew
Google was sensitive to order of appearance.

It's not. It's sensitive to your use of the "+" character, which has no
meaning to Google for a search.

While "+" character is meaningless for the search, for whatever reason
(probably a bug) gets appended to the word "china" for the search when you
put the word "china" before the phrase "general aviation". When you enter
it in the other order, the "+" character is stripped from your search,
allowing actual hits (the text "china+" doesn't match anything, not
surprisingly).

If you enter the search text, run the search, and then click the "Advanced
Search" link, you can gain some insight into how Google is parsing your
search text. Doing so reveals the above.

Bottom line: you will get a lot more utility out of Google if you stop
putting "+" characters into your search text. My guess is that you've had
lots of trouble using Google as a result of this user error, if it's
something you've expected to work for any significant amount of time.

Pete