Research: Keep Google from filtering out duplicate results

Usually, when you perform a Google search, you’re looking for specific information, and you don’t want to see Web pages that contain duplicate content. Google realizes this, so, by default, it filters out repetitive results.

But, occasionally, you won’t want that filtering — for instance, if you work for a copyright attorney who wants to know exactly how many places a particular article appears on the Web. Other times, Google’s duplicate detection can exclude results that its algorithm deems repetitive, but that do contain distinctions that matter to you.

There’s a command tag that will instruct Google to return all results, with no filtering of duplicates: &filter=0. Simply perform your search as you normally would. Then, on the first screen of results, place your cursor at the end of the text in the address bar (taking care not to select any of the text), type “&filter=0,” and press enter. By comparing the result counts before and after you added the tag, you can see that the command tag worked.

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