Google Search Tips

 

We are going to concentrate on Google because it is the most popular search engine.  We'll add to this over time and keep it around for reference.  You will be able to find it from Internet and Technology.

How does Google work? 

Here is a basic explanation:

Google indexes pages on the Web by using what are commonly known as "spiders", "crawlers", or "robots".

Google's search engine spider, GoogleBot, (for robot) uses links on web pages as a sort of freeway network. It travels from site to site by following links. When Google finds a new web page, Google will "crawl" the code on the page and transport it back to its datacenter.  It is looking for things it can index. Google's "FreshBot" may visit "indexed websites" everyday in order to keep the index fresh.  These are for highly visited sites.

Google's database maintain billions of pages. They use a proprietary formula (or algorithm) to score the relevancy of websites for each search query. The highest ranking, or most relevant websites for a specific query are listed first in the search results. You can pay Google to make sure you come up on the first page returned for certain phrases like 'fast cars' or 'great vacations'

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So what are some tricks?

  • You can do calculations in the Google search window.  All you have to do is enter things like: (4*3.14159-2.718)/sqrt(2) and back comes the answer:

((4 * 3.14159) - 2.71800) / sqrt(2) = 6.96384214

or even sin(pi/2) which returns 1 as it should

  • You can use a  ~  Tilde, which is usually on the upper left of your keyboard.  It's kind of a curly cue on its side.  If  you put in ~house, you will get pages with house on it and probably home too.

  • Putting words in quotes brings back only the pages that have exactly that phrase   "We are only the lonely"    is different from    We are only the lonely.  When I tried the first, I got over a million and the second only 2.  You may get different results, but they will be about like my results.

  • If you'd like to eliminate something on a page, then use the minus sign to exclude it.  For example, you might want to look up Music Royalties and exclude the word free so that you don't get pages that have 'free music royalties' on them, which does not make sense, but there are some.  So you would enter music royalties -free        in the Google Box.

  • How about ranges?  If you'd  like to find something about terrorism in the range 1999 to 2007, put in the phrase     terrorism 1999..2007     with the two dots only.  You'll do fine.

more to come in the future....