A bonus with using Google is it’s 'cached' feature. As it crawls the web, Google takes and stores a snapshot of each page it indexes - this means that even if the webpage you are looking for is unavailable for whatever reason, you can still access a saved copy.
A few basic tips for getting the most out of your Google search:
1. The search ignores common words, such as "how" and "where", as well as certain single digits and letters, because their inclusion slows down the search without improving results (the system will let you know, just below the search box, if a term in your query has been left out). If a common word is essential to your search, put a + sign in front of it.
2. If you want to search for an exact phrase, put quote marks around it. For example, "The white cliffs of Dover", to bring you pages about the film and the song, as opposed to Dover tourist guides that might happen to mention white cliffs.
3. If your search word has more than one meaning, you can target the results by putting a minus sign in front of the context you want to avoid. For example, to increase the likelihood of returning results about fish rather than guitars, try bass -music.
Google lets you search more than text. There's Google Images, Google Groups (for newsgroups), Froogle (for shopping searches), and Google News.
If you're feeling technologically-minded and creative, Google allows software developers to create their own programs to query the database.
Google is however not without its critics. Probably the most significant criticism levelled at the company concerns privacy issues stemming from Google's use of 'cookies' to identify records about a user and their search habits, but until the next big thing comes along Google is here to stay.
Published on 15th January 2007
