How to Google:
All the information on the Internet can be found it’s just being able to find it. This is a short guide on how to use Google to it’s fullest potential. This will not be so much a guide for the how and why of Google, but some common and less commonly tips and tricks and short explanations of the tricks with a few short explanations on how Google runs.
Beginner:
Typing a query into Google – When you type your query into Google does a formulated search on the word or set of words. Google will search each word and return the results that its search formula feels are the most significant to your search.
Deciding what to search – Google will not search for common words like the, of, at, for, and so on or numbers. It will search for the other words in the query and if the or of is contained in the page it found from the other words it will show them. So it is good to think at about what you would like to search. For example:
If you’d like to search for a book to read you could type book into Google, but maybe favourite book would be better. Would you like a list of people’s favourite books, then maybe list favourite book would be better or even list good book. You could narrow down your search even more with a possible genre you would like to read. So a list favourite book fantasy would be even better. This could be done with author and so on and so forth. It’s good to think about what you want to search it will give you more favourable results.
The quotes “” – Google will search each word separately and this will make Google search the characters inside the quotes:
Ex: The color of the wind vs. “The color of the wind”
Google would not search for the “the” or the “of” in the first search and just for pages with color, and/or wind in them. Instead with the quotes Google will search for webpages with the entire phrase “The color of the wind”. Use quotes on names like “Brad Pitt”, “Jeff Wolchak”, "Rio de Janeiro", or terms you’d just like to follow each other like “favourite book”.
The plus sign (+) – This will force Google to search for that word. So the words that are too common to use will be searched for. So for example +The color +of +the wind will now look for those words the and of. This will not work unless you have the plus in front and no space in between. Like this [+of] not like this [+ of]. Also if you put a plus in front of color it will search for that particular spelling of color and not colour.
The minus sign (-) – This will not include any words succeeding the minus sign. For Example if you want to search for the band Rough Trade one can only imagine all the porn sites that would pop up. So a search like Rough Trade –porn would be better.
Intermediate:
For all of you that have mastered which keywords to search there are various ways to narrow down your searches with the same keywords. You can use the Advanced search option which is located near the box in which Google has you put queries.
The first four that Google lets you have the option of filling out is like the options in the Beginners guide. Letting you chose which words/phrases you would like include or not. It will let you search pages in certain languages, file type like a .doc file or .pdf file, pages that have been updated in the last 3 months, 6 months, or year, and many more options.
There are some topic specific searches Google will let you run and they are on the bottom of the Advanced Search page. So, instead the favourite book example I gave back in the beginners guide you could use Google Book search to find a book. These are very helpful and there are more in development.
Also for each of Google’s country specific pages like Google for Canada Google.ca, the United Kingdom Google.uk, Germany Google.de, and many more you can search for webpages that are hosted in that country.
Advanced:
Google has some neat tricks that you can add to your searches to make them even more specific. Some of them are:
allinurl: - this will return results of all urls with the words that follow allinurl:.
For example:
allinurl: bob
Would return these websites
math.bu.edu/people/bob/
toastytech.com/guis/bob.html
bomber-bob.freeonlinegames.com/
author: - will restrict a Google groups search by the author of the group
filetype: - will search for specified file type or file extension
free essays filetype: doc
group: - will search Google groups for the search words
location: - will search the pages that are hosted in that country
Ukrainian location: Canada
Will search through all the Canadian pages for the word Ukrainian
related: - will return results of pages related to the page specified
link: - will return all pages that link to the page.
For example if your webpage linked to this page if you did a “link:” for this page your webpage would show up.
A more comprehensive and all around better list can be found at http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators.html
Also you can set the preferences on your searches, which can
be found near the box Google lets you type your searches into.
A excellent quick reference sheet can be found at http://www.google.com/help/cheatsheet.html or here http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html.
If you would to know more about better Googling three excellent websites would be: Google’s own website on understanding and better Googling http://www.google.com/help/basics.html, a very well put together guide http://www.googleguide.com/, or the UC Berkeley
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/FindInfo.html, which has handouts and PowerPoint presentations (slide show for your computer) for you to use. One good site on how Google works is the http://www.search-this.com/pagerank_decoder/, which shows you how Google ranks pages for searches.