Forming the Basic Query


The most basic Google search is performed by navigating to the Google home page at www.google.com, typing a search term into the Google Search box (shown in Figure 1.1), and pressing Enter. Before you can say Google, your results appear for you to peruse.

image from book
Figure 1.1: Type a search term and press Enter to find out almost anything.

Your search results appear with a short description of the resulting page and a link to navigate to it. Clicking the link causes you to navigate away from Google to the page. To return to Google, click the Back button in your browser. This is often represented as a left-facing arrow icon.

Keywords

The search terms you type on the Google home page are called keywords. When typing keywords, there are a few things to remember. More keywords narrow your search, but too many may cause you to be too specific and miss the information you are looking for. Google pays attention to whether the keywords are singular or plural and also searches based on the order of your keywords. For example, if you search on the two keywords town and dog in that order you will get results that start off with links to dogtown.com, a skateboard company. But the second link is to a pet shop. Change the order to dog and then town and the results change. Now at least the first 15 or so results refer specifically to Dogtown skateboarding.

Google also uses something known as stemming. This means that Google automatically looks for variations of a keyword. For example, if type the search text cloning your cat, Google also looks for clone cat (see www.savingsandclone.com).

Tip 

Don’t use the word and as a keyword. Google will ignore it. Google automatically looks for all of your keywords within a page. The most relevant page will contain all or most of the keywords.

Occasionally you will want to create phrases out of your keywords. This is particularly useful when searching on names. To create a phrase, enclose a group of words in quotes like this: “dog town”. If you try this search you will see that it gives you different results from the previous two searches on those terms. If you search on the terms John and Smith, Google looks for pages that contain the name John and the name Smith, not necessarily in the same name. The resulting Web page may have the names John Anderson and Joan Smith. Putting the name John Smith in quotes like this - “John Smith” - forces Google to search for that phrase specifically.

Querying the results

One thing Google is good at is giving you as many possible results for your query as possible. This is good in that Google is thorough and bad in that too many results could mean that the result you are really looking for is lost in the weeds. Google gives you the opportunity to do a second search but only through the results of the previous search.

Let’s say you have searched on dog breeds. The results are innumerable (actually just over 11 million). This is far too many pages to search manually. At this point you have two options: Go back and form a more specific query, or search through the 11 million results to narrow the number. At the bottom of the results page you will see a link, Search within results. Clicking this link will cause a new Search within results search box to appear. Enter a new search term. Continuing this example, try typing “fox terrier”. Even though this example returns 780,000 results, they are more specific to the dog breed fox terrier. Unfortunately you cannot continue searching through your results a second time. If there are still too many results and not specific enough you will have to go back and form a better query. Knowing how Google does is job can help you form better queries.



Google Power Tools Bible
Google Power Tools Bible
ISBN: 0470097124
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 353

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