Google 101 - Interpreting Your Results
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Google search results are deceptively simple. Google lists the links from what it believes are most relevant to least relevant, and each link includes snippets of text from the page that included your search terms. Google uses a variety of factors to determine relevance; see page 3 for an explanation.
Each link also includes detailed, useful information—provided you know how to read it. For example, the cache you see as part of most results lets you view slightly outdated versions of those pages, which sounds unappealing but can be a huge benefit when the grail you’re looking for is on a page that somebody has altered or removed from the Web. (Page 28 tells all about using the cache feature.)
Results pages also sometimes contain sponsored links (actually, ads), spelling suggestions, links to news stories, and other stuff that can help you focus your search. Figure 1-6 points out the components.
Google underusers overlook the many parts of a result, but the details are worth knowing about. Note that not every result includes all the possible components.
Interpreting your results is like conducting a basic search: You could spend your whole life never bothering to learn the details, but you’d be missing out on the true power of Google. And by knowing a few tricks, you can, over your life, shave years off your search time.
Your Actual Results
The pages that Google found for you—as opposed to those that somebody paid to have you see—are usually the most important results. Here’s how a listing breaks down (Figure 1-6 reveals all the parts).
Tip: If you find the text in your Google results listing too small to read, squint no further: your browser lets you adjust the text size. On a Mac, try Cmd-(plus sign) or Cmd-(minus). On a Windows machine, try Ctrl+(plus) or Ctrl+(minus), or look for the menu item View→Text Size.
Page title
The first line of each result is a Web page title, usually descriptive, and hyperlinked to the actual page. Sometimes, if a page has no title or if Google has not yet indexed it, a URL appears instead. Either way, click the link to head over.
Text from the site
The next line or two gives you a few excerpts from the site, with your search terms in bold letters (Google tries to include the fragment with the most context, not just the first instance of your search terms on a page). Usually, this is the most important part of your results because it gives you a sense of the context in which your query appears and whether you want to click through or not. Often, the text itself can serve as the end of your search, especially if you’re looking for a quick piece of information.
URL
Next, Google serves up the Web address for that page. Sometimes, the URL is more revealing than the page title. For example, if you’re looking for Café Canopy, the page title is“Shade Grown Bird Friendly Organic and Fair Trade Coffee from Tree…”—but the URL is simply www.cafecanopy.com. If your search words appear in the URL itself, Google displays them in boldface.
Tip: Sometimes, the reverseis true: The page titleis useful, but the URLislong and complicated…and dead. You can type a shorter version of the listed URL directly into your browser, which sometimes gets you to a live part of the same site. Working from the end of the URL, lop off sections after each slash (/). For example, if www.coca-cola.com/sodas/flavors/ideas.html doesn’t work, try www.coca-cola.com/sodas/flavors/.
Size
This number is the size, in kilobytes, of the text part the page. (If Google is aware of your site but hasn’t yet indexed the text—as explained on page 3—it doesn’t offer size data.) Of course, text is usually the least voluminous part of a Web page, so this isn’t a reliable indicator of how long a site will take to load. Instead, think of it as a clue to the contents. If the page is just one or two kilobytes, and you’re looking for detailed information, it may not be much help. On the other hand, if you’re seeking out pages that have lists of links to other pages, look for pages of 20 K and up.
Date
Occasionally, a result listing displays a date between the size and the Cached links. This date is the last time Google crawled the page—that is, the last time its automated software went around, confirmed that the page still existed, noted any changes since the last time it visited, and made a copy of it (explained next)—and Google shows the date for recently changed pages only. Google keeps track of over four billion Web pages, crawling each of them more than once a month. The date tells you how fresh that copy is, which can give you a clue as to whether it’ll be helpful or not.
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