We’ll start our examination of a basic Google search with Google’s home page, located at www.google.com. Google’s home page, shown in Figure 6.1, is almost shocking in its simplicity. Unlike what you find with Yahoo! and other web search portals, Google’s home page has no category listings, no news headlines, no stock tickers, no weather reports, and no blatant advertisements. All you see is the Google logo, the search box, two search buttons (Google Search and I’m Feeling Lucky), and some links to additional search services. It’s clean, simple, and fast.

Figure 6.1. Google’s main search page.

Initiating a basic search is incredibly easy. All you have to do is follow these steps:

That’s all there is to it. Enter your query, click the Search button, and wait for the search results page to appear.

Google is so sure of its capability to generate high-quality results that it puts an I’m Feeling Lucky button on its home page, right next to the Google Search button. When you click this button, you skip the standard search results page and go directly (and blindly!) to the page that is the number-one match to your query. (I don’t often use the I’m Feeling Lucky button, I confess, because I seldom want to see just a single result.)

After you click the Google Search button, Google searches its index for all the web pages that match your query. Then it displays the results on a search results page, like the one shown in Figure 6.2. We’ll look at each part of this page separately.

Figure 6.2. A Google search results page.

Before mid-2007, Google presented the results of all its various types of searches separately. When you queried the main Google search page, all you saw were web results. If you wanted to search for images, you had to use Google Image Search; if you wanted to search news stories, you had to use Google News; if you wanted to search blog postings, you had to use Google Blog Search; and so on.

That all changed when Google introduced its Universal Search technology. With Universal Search, relevant results from all of Google’s search indexes are shown when you search from Google’s main search page. If a query finds a relevant news article, a link to that article is mixed in with the traditional web results. Same thing if a query finds a matching image, or blog posting, or map entry. All the results are presented in a single set of results pages, with no need to query Google’s other search indexes separately. (Of course, if you want a specific type of result, you can still query the individual search services, as we’ll discuss in later chapters.)

To display only certain types of results, click the links on the left side of the statistics bar on the results page. For example, if a search returns a mix of web, image, and news results, you see links for Web, Images, and News. To view only the image results, click the Images link; to view only the news stories, click the News link.

There’s one other thing to watch for on the search results page—in particular, on the very last search results page. When you get to the last of the page listings, you’re likely to see a message like the one shown in Figure 6.3. This message tells you that Google has omitted some results that are similar to those already listed. In other words, Google is trying to simplify your life by not displaying what it feels are duplicate results.

Figure 6.3. Google sometimes omits duplicate results.

In most cases, this is fine; you don’t need to see results that essentially duplicate results you’ve already seen. But every now and then Google gets it wrong and actually omits results that you might find useful. If you suspect this is the case, click the Repeat the Search with the Omitted Results Included link. This repeats the search and displays all results, even those that may (or may not) be duplicates.

For many searches, you can find what you want simply by clicking a few page titles on the first search results page. But you may want to see more results—which, of course, Google lets you do.

First things first. Don’t assume that the only relevant results will appear on the first search results page. Some queries return literally thousands (if not millions) of matching pages, and even though the most relevant results are supposed to be listed first, it’s possible to find much useful information buried deeper in the results. For this reason, make it a habit to at least browse a few pages deeper in the search results. This is easy enough to do; just scroll to the bottom of the search results page and click the Next link. You can also go directly to a specific page in the search results by clicking a page number, as shown in Figure 6.4. And if you want to view a page beyond the first 10 listed, just click the page 10 link, and another nine page numbers are listed. Keep clicking to the right to view more and more pages of results.

Figure 6.4. The bottom of a typical search results page; click a page number to jump to that page of results.

Another useful feature is found at the bottom of the search results page. The Search Within Results link lets you narrow your results by refining your query and applying the new search solely to the original results. Here’s how it works:

Google searches the existing results, using your new query. The new, refined results appear on a subsequent search results page.

First, let’s expose the fact that Google’s searches are not case-sensitive. It doesn’t matter whether you search for California or california, the results will be the same—so don’t worry about applying proper capitalization.

In a Google query, the order of your keywords matters. Google weights the importance of your keywords in order of appearance. The first keyword is considered the most important, the second keyword the second most important, and so on. For example, hdtv retailers chicago returns slightly different results than chicago retailers hdtv.

Next, know that Google automatically assumes the word “and” between all the words in your query. That is, if you enter two words, Google assumes you’re looking for pages that include both those words—word one and word two. It doesn’t return pages that include only one of the words.

This is different from assuming the word “or” between the words in your query. As an example, compare the query bob AND ted with bob OR ted. In the first query, the results would include pages that mention both Bob and Ted. In the second query, the results would include pages that mention Bob alone, as well as pages that mention Ted alone, as well as pages that mention both Bob and Ted. It’s a subtle difference, but an important one.

The upshot is that you don’t have to enter the word “and” in your query. If you’re searching for Bob and Ted, all you have to enter is bob ted. Google assumes the “and” and automatically includes it in its internal index search.

Similarly, if you want to conduct an “or” search—to search for pages that include one word or another word, but not necessarily both—you can use the OR operator. For example, to search for pages that talk about either Bob or Ted (but not necessarily Bob and Ted together), use the query bob OR ted. And when you use the OR operator, be sure to type it in all uppercase, or Google will ignore it as a stop word—which we’ll discuss next.

Speaking of the words “and” and “or,” Google automatically ignores these and other small, common words in your queries. These are called stop words. They include “and,” “the,” “where,” “how,” “what,” “or” (in all lowercase), and other similar words—along with certain single digits and single letters (such as “a”).

Including a stop word in a search normally does nothing but slow down the search, which is why Google excises them. As an example, Google takes the query how a toaster works, removes the words “how” and “a,” and creates the new, shorter query toaster works.

If you want these common words included in your query, you have two options. You can automatically include them by using the + operator (discussed next), or you can include the common words within a phrase by enclosing the entire phrase in quotation marks (discussed a little later).

You can override the stop word exclusion by telling Google that it must include specific words in the query. You do this with the + operator, in front of the otherwise excluded word. For example, to include the word “how” in your query, you’d enter +how. Be sure to include a space before the + sign, but not after it.

Sometimes you want to refine your results by excluding pages that include a specific word. You can exclude words from your search by using the – operator; any word in your query preceded by – is automatically excluded from the search results. Remember to always include a space before the –, and none after.

For example, if you search for bass, you could get pages about a male singer and/or a fish. If you want to search for bass singers only, enter a query that looks like this: bass –fish.

Unlike some other search engines, Google doesn’t let you use wildcards to indicate the variable ends of words. Wildcards, as used elsewhere, let you search for all words that include the first part of a keyword. For example, a search for book* (with the * wildcard) typically would return results for “books,” “bookstore,” “bookkeeper,” and so on.

Instead, Google incorporates automatic word stemming, which is a fancy way of saying that Google automatically searches for all possible word variations. This is a great way to search for both singular and plural forms of a word, as well as different tenses and forms.

For example, a search for the word monster returns both “monster” (singular) and “monsters” (plural). A search for rain returns “rain,” “rained” (past tense), and “rains” (active form). And word stemming works in reverse, too; a search for rains returns both “rains” and “rain.”

Not sure you’re thinking of the right word for a query? Do you worry that some web pages might use alternative words to describe what you’re thinking of?

Fortunately, Google lets you search for similar words by using the ~ operator. Just include the ~ character before the word in question, and Google searches for all pages that include that word and all appropriate synonyms.

For example, to search for words that are like the word “elderly,” enter the query ~elderly. This finds pages that include not just the word “elderly,” but also the words “senior,” “aged,” “nursing homes,” and so on.

When you’re searching for an exact phrase, you don’t get the best results simply by entering all the words in the phrase as your query. Google might return results including the phrase, but it will also return results that include all those words—but not necessarily in that exact order.

When you want to search for an exact phrase, you should enclose the phrase in quotation marks. This tells Google to search for the precise keywords in the prescribed order.

For example, if you’re searching for Monty Python, you could enter monty python as your query, and you’d get acceptable results; the results will include pages that include both the words “monty” and “python.” But these results will include not only pages about the British comedy troupe, but also pages about snakes named Monty, and guys named Monty who have pet snakes, and any other pages where the words “monty” and “python” occur—anywhere in the page, even if they don’t appear adjacent to one another. To limit the results just to pages about the Monty Python troupe, you want to search for pages that include the two words in that precise order as a phrase. So you should enter the query “monty python”—making sure to surround the phrase with quotation marks. This way, if the word “monty” occurs at the top of a page and “python” occurs at the bottom, that page won’t be listed in the search results.

I noted previously that Google doesn’t use wildcards to complete missing letters in keywords. However, Google does let you use whole-word wildcards within a phrase search. That is, you can search for a complete phrase even if you’re not sure of all the words in the phrase. You let the * wildcard character stand in for the words you don’t know.

Here’s an example. Let’s say you want to search for pages that discuss Martin Luther King’s famous “I have a dream” speech, but you can’t remember whether the correct word in the phrase is “have” or “had.” You can use the * wildcard to stand in for the word in question; you would enter the following query: “i * a dream”.

You can even use multiple wildcards within a single phrase, within reason. Although “* * a dream” might return acceptable results, “* * * dream” is a fairly useless query.

Here’s another usage of the * whole-word wildcard. If you want to search for documents in which two words don’t appear side by side, insert the * between the two keywords in your query—while still surrounding both keywords with quotation marks. This searches for instances in which the two keywords are separated by one or more words.

For example, to search for pages where the words “happy” and “holidays” aren’t adjacent, enter this query: “happy * holidays”.

Google can search for information contained in all sorts of documents—not just HTML web pages. In particular, Google searches for the following file types and extensions, in addition to normal web pages:

If you want to restrict your results to a specific file type, use the filetype: operator followed by the file extension, in this format: filetype:filetype. For example, if you want to search only for Microsoft Word documents, enter filetype:doc along with the rest of your query.

To eliminate a particular file type from your search results, use the filetype: operator preceded by the – operator and followed by the file extension, like this: –filetype:filetype. For example, if you want to eliminate PDF files from your results, enter –filetype:pdf.

By the way, when you view a non-HTML document (something other than a web page, such as an Acrobat PDF or Word DOC file), Google displays a View As HTML link in the page listing. Clicking this link translates the original document into web page format—which often displays faster in your browser.

Maybe you want to search only those sites within a specific top-level web domain, such as .com or .org or .edu—or, perhaps, within a specific country’s domain, such as .uk (United Kingdom) or .ca (Canada). Google lets you do this by using the site: operator. Just enter the operator followed by the domain name, like this: site:.domain.

For example, to search only those sites within the .edu domain, you’d enter site:.edu along with the rest of your query. To search only Canadian sites, enter site:.ca. Remember to put a dot (period) before the domain.

The site: operator can also be used to restrict your search to a specific website. In this instance, you enter the entire top-level URL, like this: site:www.website.domain. For example, to search only within my personal Molehill Group website (www.molehillgroup.com), enter site:www.molehillgroup.com. Your results will include only pages listed within the specified website.

Google offers two methods for restricting your search to the titles of web pages, ignoring the pages’ body text. If your query contains a single word, use the intitle: operator. If your query contains multiple words, use the allintitle: operator.

For example, if you want to look for pages with the word “Honda” in the title, use the intitle: operator and enter this query: intitle:honda. Make sure not to put a space between the intitle: operator and the keyword.

If you want to look for pages with both the words “Honda” and “Element” in the title, use the allintitle: operator and enter this query: allintitle:honda element. Notice that when you use the allintitle: operator, all the keywords after the operator are searched for; you separate the keywords with spaces.

Similar to the intitle: and allintitle: operators are the inurl: and allinurl: operators. These operators let you restrict your search to words that appear in web page addresses (URLs). You use these operators in the same fashion—inurl: to search for single words and allinurl: to search for multiple words.

For example, to search for sites that have the word “molehill” in their URLs, enter this query: inurl:molehill. Be sure not to put a space between the inurl: operator and the keyword.

To search for sites that have both the words “molehill” and “group,” enter this query: allinurl:molehill group. As with the allintitle: operator, all the keywords you enter after the allinurl: operator are searched for; you separate the keywords with spaces.

For all this fuss about searching titles and URLs, it’s more likely that you’ll want to search the body text of web pages. You can restrict your search to body text only (excluding the page title, URL, and link text) by using the intext: and allintext: operators. The syntax is the same as the previous operators; use intext: to search for single words and allintext: to search for multiple words.

For example, to search for pages that include the word “Google” in their body text, enter the query intext:google. Be sure not to put a space between the intext: operator and the keyword.

To search for pages that include both the words “Google” and “search” in the body text, enter the query allintext:google search.

Two more operators are similar to the previous batch. The inanchor: operator lets you restrict your search to words in the link, or anchor, text on a web page. (This is the text that accompanies a hypertext link—the underlined text on the page.) The allinanchor: variation lets you search for multiple words in the anchor text.

For example, to search for links that reference the word “goose,” you’d enter inanchor:goose. Be sure not to put a space between the inanchor: operator and the keyword.

To search for links that reference the words “goose” and “duck,” enter the query allinanchor:goose duck.

What if you want to search for pages that contain items for sale within a certain price range? Or selected back issues of a magazine?

For these tasks, use Google’s ... operator. All you have to do is enter the lower number in the range, followed by the ... operator, followed by the higher number in the range. For example, when you enter 100...150, you search for pages that include the numbers 100, 101, 102, and so forth up to 150.

Want to know which other web pages link to a specific page? Because Google works by tracking page links, this is easy to find out. All you have to do is use the link: operator, like this: link:URL. For example, to see the thousands of pages that link to Microsoft’s website, enter link:www.microsoft.com.

Have you ever found a web page you really like, and then wondered if there were any more like it? Wonder no more; you can use Google’s related: operator to display pages that are in some way similar to the specified page. For example, if you really like the news stories on CNET’s News.com website (www.news.com), you can find similar pages by entering related:www.news.com.

Google collects a variety of information about the web pages it indexes. In particular, Google can tell you which pages link to that page (see the link: operator, discussed previously), which pages that page links to, which pages are similar to that page (the related: operator), and which pages contain that page’s URL. To get links to all this information on a single page (plus a link to Google’s cached version of that page), use Google’s info: operator. This displays a set of links, like those shown in Figure 6.6, that you can click to obtain the desired page info.

Figure 6.6. The results of applying the info: operator to the author’s www.molehillgroup.com website.

If you want to highlight all the instances of the keywords you searched for in a document, use the cache: operator, followed by the site’s URL. This displays the cached version of the web page, with the keywords in your query highlighted in yellow.

For example, to highlight all instances of the keyword “windows” on the www.microsoft.com website, enter this query: cache:www.microsoft.com windows.

What is a URL parameter? It’s a technical modifier that appears at the end of a URL; it’s essentially the internal code used to generate a particular page of search results. For example, do a basic Google search for tweeter, and then examine the URL for the ensuing search results page, which should look like this: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=tweeter. Everything after the www.google.com part of the URL are the URL parameters.

You can see that the first parameter is search?, which tells Google that you’re conducting a search. The next parameter is hl=en, which sets the language for the search results to English. The final parameter is q=tweeter, which tells Google that your query is the single keyword tweeter.

It’s not important that you learn all these URL parameters; they’re essential to Google’s internal search function, but not to you. However, if you know a few of these URL parameters, you can use them to manipulate the results that Google returns from a standard web search. Let’s look at a few of the most useful of these parameters.

If you want to filter your search results to include only pages created within the past few months, you can add the &as_qdr=m# parameter to any search results URL. With this parameter, replace the # with the number of months back you want to search; for example, &as_qdr=m3 refines your results to pages created within the past three months. (You can search back between 1 and 12 months.)

How does this work? It’s pretty simple, really. Just follow these steps:

Google reruns your search, this time filtering the results to include only those pages created within the past x months.

Now let’s look at expanding the number of results displayed on a page. Although this is something you can manipulate from the Advanced Search page, you can also do so by adding the &num=x parameter to the end of any search results URL. Just replace x with the number of results you want to display on a page, and then rerun the search with the modified URL.

We’ll look at one last URL parameter—this one is also available from the Advanced Search page but is easily duplicable in the search results URL. If you want to narrow your results to documents of a certain type of file, just add the &as_filetype=xxx parameter to the end of the search results URL. Replace xxx with the file extension (doc, jpg, pdf, and so forth), and then rerun the search with the modified URL. It’s that easy.

By default, the Google interface displays with all the text in English. Google can, however, display its main page in dozens of local languages, from Afrikaans to Zulu. To select the interface language, just pull down the Interface Language list and make a selection.

When you search Google, your query automatically searches for web pages created in any language. You may, however, want to restrict your searches to pages created in a specific language—especially if you speak only that one language.

To that end, you can instruct Google to restrict all your searches to pages created in a specific language. To do this, go to the Search Language section, check the Prefer Pages Written in These Language(s) option, and then click the language(s) you want your results restricted to. The choices range from Arabic to Vietnamese; English is somewhere in the middle.

Like it or not, there’s a lot of unsavory content on the Web. When you perform a Google search, some of these undesirable pages can end up in your search results—which is not a great thing if it’s your kids who are doing the searching.

Fortunately, Google offers a content filter that you can apply to your Google searches. Google’s SafeSearch filter screens the Google index for sites that contain adult information and then eliminates those pages from your search results. Google uses proprietary technology to check keywords, phrases, URLs, and Google Directory categories against a list of objectionable words and topics. When you activate SafeSearch, you’re blocked from viewing results that contain these undesirable words and topics.

To turn on or off SafeSearch filtering on a global basis (for all future searches), use the settings on Google’s Preferences page. You can select from one of three options:

It’s important to note that the SafeSearch filter applies only to results returned from a Google search. Google doesn’t block access to any specific web page; it just omits objectionable pages from its search results. You can still enter the URL for an objectionable page into your web browser; Google won’t keep you from going directly to that page.

It’s also important to note that although SafeSearch does a good job of filtering out objectionable pages, it isn’t perfect, and it doesn’t catch all obscene material. So it’s possible (if not likely) that some objectionable links might creep into your search results, even with SafeSearch activated. To that end, SafeSearch is not a substitute for adult supervision when your kids are searching the Web.

Commentary

By default, Google displays 10 results per page for each search you perform. This allows for a fairly fast display of results. If you want to see more results on your page, go to the Number of Results section of the Preferences page, and change the setting to 20, 30, 50, or 100. As you might expect, choosing a larger number of results per page slows down the display of results—and makes it a little harder to chug through the results.

By default, Google displays your search results in the same browser window you used to initiate your search. If you prefer to have Google open a new browser window containing your search results, go to the Results Window section of the Preferences page, and select the Open Search Results in a New Browser Window option. With this option selected, any time you click the Search Google button, a new browser window opens, with the search results listed.

Whether you’re conducting a basic or advanced Google search, you should employ a certain methodology. Follow the proper method and you’ll get very targeted results; ignore this advice and you’ll get either a ton of irrelevant results or a dearth of relevant ones.

Although there are many different (and equally valid) approaches to web searching, I guarantee that this particular approach will generate excellent results. It’s a six-step process that looks like this:

In other words, it pays to think before you search—and to continue refining your search after you obtain the initial results. The extra effort is slight, and well worth it.

When you construct your query, you do so by using one or more keywords. The keywords you enter are compared to Google’s index of web documents; the more keywords found on a web page, the better the match.

You should choose keywords that best describe the information you’re looking for—using as many keywords as you need. Don’t be afraid of using too many keywords; in fact, using too few keywords is a common mistake made by many novice searchers. The more words you use, the better idea Google has of what you’re looking for. Think of it as describing something to a friend—the more descriptive you are (that is, the more words you use), the better the picture your friend has of what you’re talking about.

It’s the same way when you “talk” to the Google search engine.

If you’re looking for a thing or place, choose keywords that describe that thing or place in as much detail as possible. For example, if you’re looking for a car, one of your first keywords would, of course, be car. But you probably know what general type of car you’re looking for—let’s say it’s a sports car—so you might enhance your query to read sports car. You may even know that you want to find a foreign sports car, so you change your query to read foreign sports car. And if you’re looking for a classic model, your query could be expanded to classic foreign sports car. As you can see, the better your description (using more keywords), the better Google can understand what you’re searching for.

If you’re looking for a concept or idea, you should choose keywords that best help people understand that concept or idea. This often means using additional keywords that help impart the concept’s meaning. Suppose you want to search for information about senior citizens; your initial query would be senior citizens. What other words could you use to describe the concept of senior citizens? How about words such as elderly, old, or retired? If these words help describe your concept, add them to your search, like this: senior citizens elderly old retired. Adding keywords like these results in more targeted searches and higher-quality results. (Additionally, you can use Google’s ~ operator to include synonyms for any selected word, as discussed previously.)

While we’re on the subject of keywords, try to limit your keywords to nouns. That’s because Google ignores many verbs and conjunctions as stop words, and other words are simply too common to be useful. The key thing to remember is that you’re searching for specific things; name those things in your query.

If you manage to execute a search that results in a perfect set of matches, you probably want to save your results so that you can access them again in the future. If you use Internet Explorer as your web browser, you should save the first results page of your search as a Favorite. (In Internet Explorer 7, click the Add to Favorites button in the toolbar.) If you use another browser, learn how to save the page as a bookmark. This way, you can click the bookmark or favorite and return to that ideal page of results, without the need to replicate the query from scratch.