Google 101 - How to Get More out of Google
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What makes Google so amazing is that more often than not, you get what you’re looking for right away. Google figures out that the pages you’re mostly likely to want are the pages other people link to most often.
Tip: In fact, the system is so reliable that Google offers an “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, described below, that takes you directly to the page that would appear at the top of your results.
Still, depending on what you’re looking for, you may have a hard time finding what you want. And as the Web grows, you can easily get too many results. A search for dog biscuit recipes, for example, turns up more than 20,000 pages. How do you choose?
Filtering is the name of the game. To prevent an attack of Futile Search Frustration, a few simple techniques help ensure that no matter what you’re looking for you’ll get to the stuff you really want—not just somewhere near it. Here’s a handful of tricks to keep in mind.
Frequently Asked Question: Why is it Called Google?
“Google” is a cute name, but does it mean anything?
The thing that stands out most on the Google home page is the company’s colorful signature. Which raises the ques-tion: Why does this search service sound like it’s named after a Muppet?
In fact, "Google" is a misspelling of the word “googol,” which is the number 1 followed by one hundred zeroes, or 10100, and brings to mind the stupendously large number of Web pages that it searches. (Extra neat fact: a googolplex is the number 1 followed by a googol zeroes, or 1010^100. Not coincidentally, Googe’s office complex is called the Googleplex.
Incidentally, the word googol was coined around 1938 by the nine-year-old Milton Sirotta, the nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner.
Getting Specific
Google is a smart Web site, but it can’t read your mind. If you search for apple, Google doesn’t know whether you’re more interested in the fruit, the computer company, the Beatles label, New York City, the singer Fiona, or something else altogether. (In this case, Google guesses you want to find the computer company, because—thanks to the techie types who hang out online—many more sites link to Apple Computer than to other sites with the word “apple.” For more on how Google judges relevance, see page 3.)
Search engines live by the maxim “Garbage in, garbage out.”So be sure to give Google hints to locate what you want—the more specific, the better. Try apple nutrition, Apple software, Apple Records, the Big Apple, or Fiona Apple. You can take your query a step further and go for “how many calories does an apple have?” Or Fiona Apple lyrics.
Tip: Actually,instead of asking Google “how many calories does an apple have?” put your search in theform of an answer: “an apple has * calories” (the asterisk stands in for the word you don’t know, as explained on page 59). After all, you want Google to find answers, not questions, so you’re more likely to hit pay dirt if you search for answers. Here’s another example: Instead of the query “Where does Oscar the Grouch live?” try “Oscar the Grouch lives in.” Or, rather than “Why is Snuffleupagus invisible?” try “Snuffleupagus is invisible because.” (When you’re searching for specific phrases, use quote marks, as explained on page 20.)
Keep in mind that Google cares about the details of your search terms. A few cases stand out:
- Singular is different from plural. As Scrabble mavens know, the “s” is a key letter. Searches for apple and apples turn up different pages. Although Google often runs singular and plural searches automatically, try both forms of a word if you’re not sure which is more appropriate for your query.
- The order of words matters. Google considers the first word most important, the second word next, and so on. Thus, brown logo brings up a lot of pages related to Brown University first, while logo brown starts off with logo designers and merchandise with logos.
- Google ignores most little words. To stay speedy and focused on the most important terms in a search, Google ignores a bunch of common words, known to search aficionados as stop words. These include “I,”“where,” “how,”“the,” “of,” “an,” “for,” “from,”“how,”‘it,”“in,”and“is,”among others, and certain single digits and letters. Most of the time, this is a good thing. When it’s not (say you want The King, not just king), use quote marks, described on the next page.
Note: Google doesn’t give out its official list of stop words. But after you run a search, it tells you if it has excluded a common word by displaying a message on the results page (right below the search box), something like this: “‘the’ is a very common word and was not included in your search.”
Google ignores most punctuation except apostrophes, hyphens, and quote marks (discussed next). When you hyphenate a word, like bow-tie, Google also searches for bowtie and bow tie. It does the reverse, too: If you search for bowtie, Google also finds bow-tie and bow tie, but it shows you the results in a different order. Similarly, Google treats Paul’s, Pauls’ and Pauls as three related searches (though it acts as if Senator P. Simon and Senator P Simon are the same guy). So for commonly hyphenated or compound words, it’s sometimes worth running the search a few different ways to bring up a variety of results.
The other kind of punctuation that Google recognizes is two periods in a row, as explained in the box below.
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