Exploring Google

Query and Results | Advanced Search | Tips | More Tools

Google is the most popular and most used search engine. People will say they "googled" someone or something - meaning they used Google to find the information.

Google has said that it "knows" 1 trillion urls (ie web addresses). It carries all formats of files found on the web - web pages, weblogs, pdf documents, word documents, spreadsheets, powerpoint files, flash files, and many other types. As well it has separate search engines for images, videos, blogs, maps, news.

Google ranks results in part according to how important each result is - and that depends on how many sites link to result and how important and established those linking sites are. Google is good at interpreting whether links represent a true citation or whether they are "gamiing" the system. By and large results from the better known and authoritative sites rise to the top. Google tends to display informational resources first.

Google's aim is to "organize the world's information" and to that end it has taken to mapping the Earth (Google Earth), recording street views (Google Maps), digitizing books (Google Book Search) and indexing journals and other scholarly materials (Google Scholar).

See all that Google has to offer on the More page.

Google!

Google Canada www.google.ca

Shows option to search only "pages from Canada". Google is fairly good at identifying Canadian sites regardless of domain. There is a French language interface.

Search Query

Google accepts up to 32 terms. Google will extend the search box if your query is very long.

Google easily detects misspellings. Enter climte change and it will ask if you meant climate change. In some instances, it will run the search automatically with the correct spelling.

On single words and some phrases, Google will provide a definition from its dictionary. You can see the link to definition in this search on global warming.

Search Results

For the query strategies for web searching

• Google looks for all the words. Usually words are an exact match. But sometimes Google will "stem" to find other words with the same root. For example, on this query for strategies for web searching, Google will return results with search and searching and strategy and strategies. You can turn this off with a plus sign -- +strategies for web +searching.
  
  
• When the result is a major site, Google often shows links to key pages in the site.
  
  
  

• Where there is more than one relevant page, Google lists the best match from a site first and will indent the second best. "More results from ..." signifies that there are more matching pages at the site. Click on More to see them all.

• When appropriate Google shows "universal search results", a term Google adopted to describe the retrieval of relevant items from images, news, maps, and other Google search tools. These will be distributed through the results, such as in this query for beijing china where you will likely see a map, news stories, images, and possibly a video.
  

• Searches Related To: Google will often show at the bottom of the page search queries that others have done that Google considers related to your query. These may give you some ideas.
  
  

The Choices

Cached: Google saves a copy of pages it indexes. View the cache to see when Google indexed the page and what it looked like then. This gets around the problem of a dead site or server unavailable. Search terms are highlighted on the cached page, making it easier for you to find the relevant text.

Similar Pages: Google picks pages that are "similar" based (somewhat) on mutual links.

Languages: Google can search for pages in 51 different languages. Searchers can set the default language through Preferences. Searchers may also view the home page and messages in their favourite language. There are 129 interface languages to choose from on the Preferences page including curiosities like Bork Bork and Hacker. Set your preferences through Language Tools page.

Translate: Google will offer to translate pages in a foreign language to your selected display language (set through Preferences). At Google Translate you can enter text and or a page address (URL) or upload a document. With Translated Search you can enter using your language, see the results in the foreign language and have those translated back to your language. See A New Look for Google Translate.

Personalized Results: Google customizes results according to what you seem to prefer. It knows this by tracking the history in the browser you are using (Internet Explorer, Firefox etc) to see what searches you run and pages you view. You can disable this by clicking on Web History but you cannot change the data that has been collected.

An account holder who is signed in can look at the web history, review searches, be reminded of what was viewed and how often, and make changes to that history. It can be a good way to retrace steps.

There are other advantages. As a registered user, you can keep bookmarks in Google and have these on your history page. When running searches, you have additional options to add a comment (public), promote a result to a higher ranking (or demote).

This video explains.

Real Time Search

Google brings in results from Twitter and other social media sites to capture real time reports and comments on events. These will show in a scrolling box on the search results page, often below excerpts from Google News.

Show Options

In 2009 Google introduced on a trial basis many new options for viewing results - by date range, with images, with better previews, and on a timeline. All are worth exploring and can make your searching more productive.

To see these, click on +Show options in the upper left area of the search results page.

1. Get other types of results - such as discussion in forums, blog postings, videos, news - and sometimes books. The grouping for Updates will show real-time search results.

2. See results that have been recently indexed - latest (last few minutes), past hour, past day, week, year. Times are roughly based on when Google found and indexed the item.

3. Explore the related searches visually using the Wonder Wheel.

4. Use the timeline to see how topic developed over time.

5. Adjust display to see an image from the page, or to "preview" the page. Either of these can help in deciding which results to look at.

6. Use More Shopping on product searches.

Advanced Search

For more control over the search use Google's Advanced Search page.

Search for pages that have gun control canada in the title and also one of law or legislation. Follow the example below.

1. Enter search terms in the area marked Find web pages. Identify all the ones you must have, and those where there is a choice - eg law or legislation
2. Increase the number of results to be displayed per page to at least 30.
3. Consider the filetype. You may want to look for publications in the pdf format.
4. Domain. Can restrict a search to a country, eg .ca for Canada, or a site such as the Government of Canada - gc.ca.
5. Expand for more options to limit the search by date, numeric range, and more. Specify that you want the "keywords to show up" in the title of the page.
6. Note the search query that Google creates at the top of the page.

Google Tips

Wonder why you got the google.ca even though you typed in google.com? Google redirects searchers to the domain of the country they are working from. If you are in Italy you will get www.google.it and unless you read Italian that could be a problem. Get around this by using www.google.com/search

Google has many extra tricks. Some of the best are below. Get the full list at Google Web Search Features.

1. Define a word - get definitions from web pages.
   define search engine optimization will show the first definition.
   
2. Do calculations.
   number of milliliters in a teaspoon
   6 / 250 * 100
   
3. Get a map for a place in the United States or Canada.
   1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Washington DC
   1 sussex drive ottawa or 1451 yonge st toronto
   
4. Get information about a web site. Enter info: followed by the URL in the search box.
   info:www.websearchguide.ca
   
5. Find businesses and services close to where you live. Available for the US and Canada. Use address or zip / postal code. Try it for coffee shops near you. Google Local will provide address, description, and an interactive map. In Canada, go to www.google.ca/local and in the US, www.google.com/local.
   
6. Find places in Canada, the United States, Europe and other parts of the world. Get directions using Google's interactive maps - maps.google.com

More Google Search Tools

Google Scholar (scholar.google.com)

Google Scholar is a database of pages that Google considers scholarly: pages from educational sites, publishers of books and journals, the CrossRef service, and selected sites. Google makes the interconnections for citations, showing where articles have been cited or if the article itself is a citation. It doesn't have everything and often the article you want will cost money, but it might be a good start when you want academic material. Be sure to check if your local library can get the article for you before paying the price.

Google Book Search (books.google.com)

Google Books Search has digitized about 10 million books of which over 1 million books are in the public domain and can be downloaded (pre 1923), and another 4 to 5 million are copyrighted out-of-print books that can be partly viewed. In addition, you may be able to get access to in-print books where Google has an agreement with the publisher for $5.99 US or less.

Google merged two projects: to digitize new books in partnership with some publishers; and digitize the book collections of participating libraries. At Google Books you can search by title, author, publisher, publication date, language, subject or ISBN. Google will search full text when it has it and show snippets from the pages. There are four views: Snippet (from the text), Limited Preview (table of contents and selected pages), Full (download a pdf copy) for public domain books, and No Preview (bibliographic information and references to the book). Google Books also links to WorldCat to help in finding the book in a library (works best for US locations). In December 2008 it began to add magazines - search for only those if you like, but using the Advanced Search, and selecting Magazines.

Google News Archive
(news.google.com/archivesearch)

Google partnered with many news organizations including Time, The New York Times, the Guardian, and with aggregators Factiva, LexisNexis, Thomson Gale and HighBeam Research, to index content going back 200 years. Google News Archive will show excerpts on articles older than 30 days and link to the source for the full article. Some are free, most cost money. This program is expected to be expanded with Google offer to digitize microfilmed newspaper archives. There is a timeline feature that will show how a story developed.

Google Image Search and Video Search - see Multimedia Search

Where to Next?

Compare Google's results to Yahoo's.