Google 101
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Google is appealing because it’s so straightforward. But you can get a lot more out of the site by knowing your way around the subtle details and using the less prominent features. Authors Sarah Milstein and Rael Dornfest guide you through basic search techniques and help you analyze search results in ways that would surprise many power users. (Chapter 1 from the book
Google: The Missing Manual, O'Reilly Media, 2004, ISBN: 0-596-00613-6.)
If you’ve never used Google before, you’re in luck: it’s incredibly easy to run a simple search. But if you’ve been using Google since the day it debuted, and you’ve never tried an image search or clicked the “Similar pages” link, consider yourself part of the vast Underusers Club.
Google is appealing because it’s so straightforward. But you can get a lot more out of the site by knowing your way around the subtle details and using the less prominent features. This chapter guides you through basic search techniques and helps you analyze search results in ways that would surprise many power users.
The Heart of Google: Basic Text Searches The Google home page (www.google.com) is as plain and friendly as Web pages get—loading quickly both for dial-uppers and broadband jockeys. As Figure 1-1 shows, it features tons of white space, a blank search box awaiting your command, two buttons, and a handful of links. What less could you want?
Google is about as hard to use as your refrigerator. To run a search, just follow this simple procedure:
1. Point your browser to www.google.com. You can skip the“www”part and just type google.com in the address bar, then press Enter. (Google fills in the “www” for you.)
As shown in Figure 1-2, the address bar is the space at the top of the browser where you can type in a new URL. URL (pronounced “You Are El”), which stands for Uniform Resource Locator, is the unique electronic address assigned to every Web page, and it tells computers where to find that page on the Internet. A URL looks like this: http://www.missingmanuals.com, or sometimesjust www.missingmanauls. com, or even missingmanuals.com. Google’s URL is www.google.com. URLs are also known as Web addresses, and you’ll see a lot of them as you surf around.
To move to a new Web page, highlight the current address (in most browsers, clicking once in the address bar does the trick), type your new URL right over the old one, then press Enter.
Once you’ve entered Google’s address, its home page—shown in Figure 1-1—snaps to attention, with a blinking cursor in the blank search box, ready to receive your search words.
2. Type in the word or words you want to search for (up to ten of them), and then press Enter or click Google Search. Google looks for Web pages that contain the words you type (you may hear these words called keywords, search terms, and queries, but they all mean the same thing).
If you put in Britney Spears, you get not only Britney’s official Web site (www. britneyspears.com), but a couple million fan sites and media outlets that have mentioned her, too.
Common searches include proper nouns like celebrities’names, company names, places in the news, the name of your high school, and your own name. You can also look for things like New York subway map, or prostate cancer support group, or hemp wholesalers.
3. Scroll through your results, and click any link to jump to that page.
Links appear underlined, in blue, and when you mouse over them, the cursor turns into a hand. Figure 1-3 depicts a typical results page.
Tip: In most browsers, you can right-click or Shift+click (c-click) a link to open it in a new window, thereby preserving your list of results for further exploration.
4. To return to your Google results, click the Back button on your browser (or, if you preserved your results window, simply switch to it). If you don’t find what you want on one page, you don’t have to type Google’s URL again and retype your search, too. You can just click back to the original results.
Tip: A lot of browsers, including Internet Explorer, have a little down arrow beside the Back button. If you click it, it displays a list of the pages you’ve most recently visited. It’s super-handy when you’ve clicked your way down into a site and want to jump back to your Google results—or anywhere else you’ve been—without backing through every page you’ve hit.
Congratulations. You’ve just used one percent of Google’s power. And that’s as far as 99 percent of the population ever goes.
The rest of this chapter gives you tips on extracting more power from Google using less effort, including a tour of a typical results page highlighting the little-visited, but treasure-filled corners of Google (page 26).
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