Effective searching with Google

If you've been on the internet for longer than five minutes, chances are you will have already used Google. Founded in 1998, it has grown to become the most used search engine on the web, to the extent where the name has turned into a verb, "to google", as in "Have you tried googling it?" Google indexes a whopping 8 billion URLs that will be scanned in your search. The sites returned by a Google search are organised according to their "PageRank" system: an algorithm that rates pages according to the amount of links they receive from other sites, and the importance of the sites that link to them. As Google puts it, "PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." PageRank is used in conjunction with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find the most relevant answer to your query. It will only return results that match all the words in your search, or, through another proprietary technology, results that match very close variations on your search; for example, a query for "comic book" will give results on "comic books" too. Results are also prioritised based on how close together the individual words in your search appear to each other in the returned text; in other words, a page that contains the entire phrase "comic book" will be ranked higher than one that mentions the word "comic" in one paragraph and the word "book" in another. 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