Setting Search Preferences

There are five global preferences you can change. These include

• Interface Language

• Search Language

• Safe Search Filtering

• Number of Results

• Results Window

If you go to the Google main page (www.google.com) you see three links next to the box where you type the search expression. One of these is the Preferences link. Clicking this link takes you to a page where you can modify the way Google delivers its search results.

Tip 

Changing your preferences will apply to all Google services.

Setting languages

The first preference, Interface Language, allows you to select from among the 119 different languages of which Google is capable to display tips and messages. All Google pages will be displayed in the language you select, not including Google search results.

Cross-Ref 

See Chapter 23 to learn more about setting language preferences in Google.

The Search Language preference allows you to choose which language Google uses to perform its Web page search. Results will include Web pages written in your selected language. There are two options: You can search for pages written in any language, or you can search only for pages written in the languages you select. You are provided with a list of 31 languages, and you can select as many as you want. Click the checkbox next to the language to select it. Google recommends choosing the first option: Search for pages written in any language. This is recommended because when you do your search you will get more results. If you only choose a few or a single language only, Google will not search the whole World Wide Web; it searches only the pages written in the specified language or languages.

Setting filter options

SafeSearch Filtering filters adult sites containing explicit sexual content. There are three SafeSearch options:

• Use strict filtering: This eliminates search results with explicit images and explicit textual content.

• Use moderate filtering: This filters only explicit images. This is the default setting for Google.

• Do not filter my search result: No filtering takes place.

SafeSearch filtering its not 100 percent accurate but it does a very good job. Chapter 4 contains much more information about SafeSearch.

Result number setting

When searches return a large number of results it can be time consuming to continue paging through the results. Instead of using the default number of ten results per page you can choose to customize the results page by choosing a larger number of results per page. To change the number of results that Google displays use the Number of results preference setting. You may choose to see 10, 20, 30, 50, or even 100 results for page by selecting from the drop-down list.

Note 

The more results you choose, the longer it takes the results to load into your browser.

Opening a new results window

The last preference is Results Window. By selecting this option you can choose to view search results in a new browser window. Every time you do a search and click on a search result link a new browser window opens on your computer displaying the results of your search. This is particularly handy if you want to compare or view many results at the same time.

Another option to seeing your results displayed in a new window is after you perform your Google search, you have the option of opening each result in a new window by holding the Ctrl key and clicking the link with your mouse. On a Macintosh this is the Option key.

Prefetching

Prefetching is a special feature of Mozilla and Firefox browsers. Similar to I’m Feeling Lucky, Prefetching bets that what you are looking for is in the first Web page. With Prefetching set in your browser, Google begins downloading the first Web page that appears on the Google search results page. This increases efficiency as the first page is already loaded and ready to display rather than waiting for it to load after clicking the link in the search results.

Caution 

If you have this feature turned on in your browsers, you may end up with cookies from Web pages you have never visited along with additional pages in your Firefox or Mozilla caches. If these pages contain images, they will be saved in your Temporary Internet files.