Effective Googling
There is a larger abundance of information available to us now than any other time in the history of mankind. Having access to the internet means that this informational abundance is at your fingertips. Exactly how much information is in this abundance? The size of the internet cannot possibly be accurately measured in quantity. There over 21.67 billion* indexed web pages, which is estimated at “roughly 5 million terabytes”** of data. That is a lot of information.
You can find almost anything on the internet. Fortunately, Google and other search engines makes sense of this behemoth mountain of information. However, not many people know how to effectively use Google. There are numerous little tricks and techniques to using Google more effectively to get what you are looking for. Here are the most useful and simple ones I often employ to get more focused search results...
(omit the [ ] brackets in your search terms)
When you want Google to look for an exact phrase, use double quotes, for example [ “Newton, Sir Isaac” ] will search only pages containing an exact match for “Newton, Sir Isaac”. However, this search will exclude other terms like “Isaac Newton”, which may also be relevant, so use discretion with double quotes.
Occasionally you want results only from a specific website. In such cases, use the following search query format: [ site:www.website.com keyword(s) ]. For example, if I want pages about speed reading from Wikipedia only, I would search for [ site:www.wikipedia.com speed reading ].
You can exclude certain words or websites from searches by inserting a minus sign [ - ] immediately before the word or site you want to exclude. [ -mercedes car ] will filter out results with the term ‘mercedes’ in them. [-site:www.wikipedia.com quantum physics ] will return results matching the term quantum physics, but not from Wikipedia.
The * operator, or wildcard symbol, is a substitute for any term or word or phrase. Searching for [ * card deck ] will return various different versions of card decks. [ Hypnosis * ] will likely get you different events and products and courses on hypnosis.
Google matches your search terms with synonyms for you automatically, although it is said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. To search for a phrase exactly as it is, add the [ + ] sign immediately before a specific word. This will tell Google not to include synonyms or similar words or phrases in the search results.
If these techniques are new to you, it becomes more interesting, a lot more interesting, although what I write about here are still relatively basic search methods.
By default, Google uses the keyword(s) of a search term as a whole to match results. If you want to search for either something, or something else, this can be accomplished by using the [ OR ] operator in your search terms. An example would be searching for [ hypnotic induction OR hypnotic language ] . Note that the use of capitals in the OR operator. It can also be substituted with the ‘ | ‘ or pipe character, as in [ hypnotic induction | hypnotic language ]. This technique is particularly useful when searching for different dates or years.
Becoming familiar with these handy Googling techniques is worth the little effort. Because of the millions upon millions of results that Google usually conjures up, nowadays it is becoming ever more important to discriminate between relevant and irrelevant search results. From time to time, when you are searching for less common information, it can become rather time consuming to sift through thousands or millions of results to find the right information.
I will soon be posting another article on the more advanced techniques of how to get the most out of Google’s power.
Sources (dated 3 November 2009):
*http://www.worldwidewebsize.com
**http://www.wisegeek.com
