Effective Google Searching
Monday, April 28, 2003
Why bother with a tutorial for Google? You just type in you topic and go, right?
Yes, you can do it that way but as I’m sure you’ve found, there tends to be a lot of results you don’t want mixed in with what you’re looking for. Even long-time Internet users and trained database searchers can get lost in the huge and unindexed Google Internet database.
Below is a shot of the well-known simple search box.
Next is the result page of our search. Over five million results on five completely different topics in the first page alone is a little much to go through.
Pretend we’re looking for information on tigers for a middle school report. You notice that one of the results on the first page is about Tiger Woods the golf player. To exclude these pages, you can use a minus sign (-) in place of the boolean operator “Not” with the word “golf.”
You can see we immediately get rid of three million pages, almost half of the original set. Another method of narrowing a search is to add more terms to your query. Instead of just searching for tiger in general, typing in “Asian tiger” takes the set down to 400,000. Google automatically combines the words with “And,” requiring every page to have both terms in the page. Pages were they occur closer together are ranked higher and appear first in the result list.
You can force Google to only find asian tiger as a phrase by putting it in quotes. The set is brought down to 13,000.
A link to Google’s advanced search page appears next to the search box. There are a number of options available on this page, including adding words to your search and setting your result page to showing up to 100 results per page, only retreiving pages in English, those updated recently, and restricting the areas where your terms occur in the pages. There are several other options on the page as well such as a link to the Advanced Search Tips with even more advice and an option to limit your results to a certain website or domain.
Finally, with our search query set at the phrase asian tiger combined with the term conservation and restricted to where they are in the text of those pages written in English and updated in the last three months, our result set has come from 5 million pages down to 200, taking less than a minute longer than the original one. And you can see from the result list that it’s very narrow indeed.
Tutorials — laura
