How to search the japanese internet?

Japanese doesn’t use spaces. So. How do I search for something in japanese that includes multiple keywords? Whenever I search for something in japanese, I find myself switching keyboards just to be able to add a space in between words, so that google knows that the two things are separate

What is the standard practice as far as this is concerned?

You generally will use spaces between keywords/phrases.

If you’re looking for just a definition of something you can just type “の意味” or something at the end:

映画の意味

BUT the more specific, the less spaces you have. If you’re looking for a movie time or something it would look like:

映画館 横浜 新・仮面ライダー

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There’s no need to switch keyboards to put a space. Japanese does use spaces, just not the same way as in English. With a physical keyboard, you can just hit the spacebar as normal and it’ll insert a full-width space. On mobile keyboards, there should be a key labeled “空白” which is the space key.

In any case, I don’t do much searching in Japanese, but when I want to separate terms I just put a space between them, and it seems to work fine. Like earlier I searched “テニス  テイクバック” because I wanted to see if it was indeed called “backswing” in English (I’m reading a tennis novel but barely know any tennis terms in either English or Japanese…), and it brought up relevant pages.

(Edited to make that a double space since Discourse converts full-width spaces to half-width ones upon posting and you can barely tell half-width spaces are even there in JP text…)

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(Modern) Search engines typically figure out what you need without having to make it a sentence or include spaces. If I want to know the Pizza Hut locations in Hyogo (I ordered Pizza Hut last night), I could just google ピザハット店舗一覧兵庫県 (ピザハット, Pizza Hut, 店舗一覧, list of locations, 兵庫県, Hyogo prefecture) and it parses it without any difficulty. 店舗ピザハット兵庫県一覧 works equally well, even though it’s a weird order to write them in.

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I’ve been watching one of the JFF Independent Films this evening, and the main character googles something like this:

So yeah, spaces are definitely in play. :slightly_smiling_face:

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I tend to throw in a の to cut out the Chinese-language hits, but there’s probably a neater way to do that.

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I usually switch back to English and add “site:*.jp”, though that’s going to omit any results that are in Japanese but not in the Japan TLD.

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You can make spaces even when typing in Japanese. 例えば、 スペースをした。

For searching in general I would just post a couple of keywords or a phrase related to what I’m looking for. For instance:

  • Xについて
  • Xはどういう意味?
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