Good video about finding an email address using advanced search syntax at Google. Video was created by Boost Elearning in 2009 but still very much applies.
Search Technique for finding an email address
Category Archives: Search Techniques
Google’s Related Searches
Not enough people were interested in Google related searches for Google to keep it in the list of search options. It has been removed from “more tools” but will still be shown at the bottom of search results page. To be honest, I never noticed it on the list, and often ignore the suggestions at the bottom of the page. However, I do know through students in my classes, that those “related searches” do help them consider new aspects or angles of their queries.
Google Pulls Related Searches Filter Due To Lack Of Usage, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Apr 23)
Tips from Google Operating System
Google Operating System blog has two good postings on Google search features.
Advanced Uses for Google’s Site: Operator (March 8) – points out a few tricks with site.
You can use the * as a wildcard in searching domain and even the directory path. This is helpful in exploiting patterns such as site:gov.*.ca where * stands in for province. This is my example – and patterns aren’t pure.
I didn’t know that we can use * in domain – as in site:news.* to pick up all domains that start with news – such as news.yahoo.com and others. For example — site:news.* ashley judd. I don’t think this is the best way to search for news, but there might be other applications for this.
Of course we can OR site searches: (site:harvard:edu OR site:mit.edu) mooc.
More in the article.
Show the Number of Results When Using Google Search Tools – Google hides number of search results if you use Search Tools button at the top. I hadn’t noticed that before. Hit Search Tools again to get the number. Dumb design.
Alex Chitu observes – as I would – that ” If Google only returns 50-100 results, you may need to remove some of the keywords, fix some mistakes, disable some of the filters.”
Number count doesn’t really matter unless it’s a small set.
Evaluating a site
This SEO advice for getting high qualities links – or citations, as it is called in this article – is also good advice for vetting a particular site.
How to Identify Quality Citation Sources, Whitespark (Mar 8)
Some of the point to consider:
- quality of link profile – various tools
- age of domain – check – Internet Archive can help
- size of site in indexed pages
- ranking of brand name in search results
Work with word pairs
Word order in a search query matters. Daniel Russell shows this well in this One Minute Morcel –1MM #8 — Why search query word order matters
It’s a matter of word pairs. Google (and other search engines) will rank results that have terms in the order you used more highly. In Russell’s video, we see this is especially the case with word pairs – or bigrams, as Russell calls them. snake grass is different from grass snake. It pays to move words around into new meaningful pairs – the new order often delivers a different perspective and slice of the data.
Under the Hood at Google and Bing
I was poking around in Google Plus – found Dan Russell’s page – he’s Google’s search guru – and noticed a session about Google and Bing for Researchers delivered for the National Institutes of Health as a NIH Libraries’ seminar, on February 6, 2013.
http://videocast.nih.gov/summary.asp?Live=12437&bhcp=1
Screenshot from webcast
Russell, research scientist at Google (on left), and Duane Forrester, senior product manager with Bing’s Webmaster Program (on right), spoke about their search engines, the work being done to improve search, and search techniques.
Forrester spoke first and spent some time explaining Bing’s work to understand a person well enough to produce better search results – and drawing on social results to add authority and refine results.
Russell starts at about 47 minutes in the video. He used search challenges from his blog (Search Research) explaining how he arrived at the answers using variety of Google resources, web resources, and search techniques. What do people need to know to be good searchers?
- What’s out there to be found.
- Where the content is located. How is it organized
- Search tactics.
- Strategies on how to frame the question. Knowing when to stop and when to try something else.
The first skill is to use CTRL F (Windows) or CMD F (Mac) on a page – and to make use of browser features to see the words. Surprisingly, according to Russell, 90% of searchers don’t know this.
The seminar is 2 hours long – very rich.
Searcher
Searcher magazine, much valued by librarians for 20 years, has published its last issue. It will be merging with Online, also a publication from Information Today, to be part of Online Searcher. Barbara Quint, the editor, said her goodbyes in The Long View.
The complete December 2012 is available for free download.
- Videos for the people by the people
- The Future of Mobile – Walled Gardens or Open Access
- Trolls, Cyberbullies, and Other Offenders: Dealing With Antisocial Behavior on the Internet
- The Government Online: Tell It to Washington Online
- The Medical Digital Clinical Trials – Part 2. Identifying and Participating in Clinical Research Studies
- The Sidebar – The Frugal Legal Researcher
- Publishing Trends – The Future for Library Searching – Proprietary Subscription Databases, Google Scholar, or Content Farms?
Using site: – excellent tip from D Russell
The command site: can be used at nearly any search engine – and certainly Google, Bing, Duckduckgo, and Blekko – to search all the pages the search engine has indexed from that domain: eg., site:utoronto.ca marshall mcluhan looks for marshall on all pages in the University of Toronto domain. This is one of the best advanced search methods to know.
Daniel Russell give us another application – use site:maps.google.com to find maps and commentaries other people have posted about places. Brilliant. Watch his 1 Minute Morceau video to see what this is all about.
My example is a web search for site:maps.google.com manitoulin trails.
You will likely see some kml files – kml is a file format used to display geographic data in Google Earth and Google Maps. You must view it in Google maps – and Google gives you a handy link to do so.
You might also find custom Google maps that people have created about an area with comments and photos.
Either way you could find some real treasures that would not normally appear in Google web search results.
Check the Cache
The value of viewing the cache at Google for a view of the indexed page really registered with me on this search. I was looking for biographical information about a Canadian author – and finding very little. This query got a good hit from the Archives of Ontario as we can see in screenshot of the snippet below, but the actual page blocked my access. This is, by the way, an example of “invisible web”, where the information is buried in a database – you need to know the database. But Google had indexed it and a click on cache revealed it.
Remember to mouseover the chevrons on the right of a search result to see the preview and find the link to cache.
Using Cache at Google
Guide to Google’s Search Options
This guide to the new search interface at Google just saved me a lot of time. Google moved search options from the left panel to the top and hid them all behind dropdown boxes. These screenshots and explanations will show you how to find the options (click on Search Tools), and suggest ways you can use them for better searching – translations, pages with images, verbatim etc.
More Free Google Search Tools You Might Not Be Using So Much by Saikat Basu, Make Use Of (Nov 26)