Superior Searching
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Want to get the most of out of your searches on Google? See these advanced tips from the book
Google: The Missing Manual (O'Reilly Media, 2004, ISBN: 0-596-00613-6). Authors Sarah Milstein and Rael Dornfest talk about using Froogle, getting local results and more. (See
link for Chapter 1.)
Searching the Web is like panning for gold. There’s a lot of dirt out there, and you need the right tools to get at the shiny nuggets. The previous chapter provided the sieve. But to become a real search jockey, you need tweezers. And forceps. And maybe a staple gun.
It might help to think of every search as a problem, and to bear in mind that different problems require different solutions. “How do I find out which Web sites link to mine?” needs a different approach than “I want to find sites about Miss Piggy—but only those in Urdu.”
This chapter sets you up with an array of techniques that you can use to run different kinds of searches or get more specific results from any search. Because Google’s preference settings can affect all of your results big time, this chapter starts with them.
Have it Your Way: Setting Preferences
Software programs almost always let you change some settings, like the way Microsoft Word, for example, lets you choose the standard font or turn spell checking on and off. Google lets you set some preferences, too. But unlike Word and other programs that hang out on your hard drive, Google remembers your settings with a
cookie, a tiny program that a Web site can place on your computer and communicate with.
You can reach Google’s settings page by clicking Preferences on the home page or at the top of any results page. Figure 2-1 shows the Preferences page, from which Google lets you control five settings: interface language, search language, filtering, number of results, and which window the results appear in. You have to click Save Preferences to activate the new settings.
Tip: If you change your settings and return to Google only to find they didn’t take, your browser could be set to reject cookies. Check your browser’s security or privacy settings. In Internet Explorer, for example, choose Tools → Options and then click the Privacy tab. You can move the slider to change the intensity with which the program blocks cookies (anything below the highest setting works for Google). Or you can click Edit to specify a Web site from which you want to allow cookies.
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