It’s ironic that Google is my Mozilla home page and yet I rarely use it for that purpose. I am quite often frustrated and/or disappointed in the results.
Having spent some time as a Doper I have come to the realization that my “google-fu” is weak. However I have no idea as to why it is so. It seems simple enough. You require information regarding a particular subject, you type in that subject and Shazam, the info appears on the screen.
However experience leads me to believe it is not as simple as that. I don’t think I am doing anything grossly wrong but I think I could do what I am doing, better.
Could I impose on some of our more knowledgeable Dopers to give me,and possibly others , a 101 on how to use Google to its maximum?
Oh,as an aside, where do you guys come up with those obscure cites on anything and everything, so often and so fast?
I am forever indentured to whoever takes time to respond.
It’s all about choosing your search terms carefully using the Advanced Search Options, mainly the operators OR, quote, minus/plus and wildcards. The results can be significantly different, because of synonyms and context and such, and you get much more refined matches using the advanced options. As you can imagine Google’s database is massive and it’s really an art to dig up those relevant but obscure links. If it can be put into words someone somewhere probably has a web page about it.
It might help if you gave us examples of search arguments you used that apparently failed you. I don’t always get clean hits on the first try, but knowing alternative arguments is the way to get past that. (One way I can think of right off hand is to add a qualifying word to the search argument that will limit responses. This presumes you have some knowledge of the topic, of course, but the better knowledge you have, to begin with, the better your search arguments, anyway.)
Thanks Pedro . So help me, as often as I’ve looked at that page, I never noticed that function. :smack:
Tom , this might help with the example I was going to give you. What prompted this question, in addition to my admitted noobiness was a search of a name I attempted a couple of days ago. My only strategy at clarity was to put quote tags around the name. The first five or six hits were the full name (not the right one, but) the rest, as you probably have guessed, were combinations of first name, last name, last name, first name but never the same person.
I suspect the hint Pedro gave will help in that area. Other than that, I think the question was rather generic. I just suspect people are more conversant than I and I was just trying to pick some brains.
I thought, as well, that other Dopers might benefit. I have learned more about my computer and the internet here on this board than I have anywhere else.
I typically search by entering a phrase related to what I’m looking for that is likely to be used on the page. For example, if I’m searching for a game, I’ll do:
gamename pc game
That will filter results for instances of the game for other systems and specify that I’m looking for a game, not a movie or song or whatever else might be associated with the name of the game.
If I find that my hits are getting too many unrelated results, I’ll find out what commonality the undesirable results have and filter it out by excluding that word. For example:
gamename pc game -undesirableword
I can filter out any number of undesirable words by tacking on more -undesirableword filters one after the other. I’ve done this on YouTube to narrow down videos about very specific subject matter that may have other videos related to it only peripherally (such as parodies, reviews, etc.)
If I’m looking for attribution for a specific quote, or trying to remember what the quote is in full, I’ll search for a portion of that quote (preferably a part that doesn’t often get misquoted) within quotation marks so that it finds those words in that exact order and in their entirety. I can also add other search terms outside the quotes to further narrow them down.
For the most part I always find what I’m looking for. I only really run into problems if the search word and/or subject matter I’m looking for is highly ambiguous. That requires some finagling, which I sometimes fail at completely.
Googling a person’s name can be tough if is a common name. One way to do it is to add a list of words that might appear in the same page. These might include words associated with his hobbies or profession, or even where you know they have lived (list those terms after the “with at least one of the words” choice in advanced search). It might also help to use certain terms to exclude hits. For instance, if you get a lot of false hits for someone of that name who is a well known painter, then use the term “painter” to exclude those hits (or better yet, use the name of a painting). Sometimes getting the right hit is a matter of eliminating the wrong ones. You need to be persistent.
I find the best tactic is to use quotes. Try to think of an exact phrase that is likely to appear on the page you are looking for, and stick it in quotes. Want to know where John Q. Pugglewitz was born? Type:
"john q pugglewitz" "was born in"
Want a guaranteed cast-iron cite about bagpipes? Try:
One thing I do when trying to research an item I’m considering buying is to throw in a few colloquial words or phrases to weed out the ads. If I put in just ‘bench press’ and ‘weight set’ I’m likely to get a million hits for sites trying to sell me products, but if I add ‘sucks’ or ‘terrible’ or ‘waste of money’ I might get an honest review of the product. With a little creativity this technique can help you in looking up other things, too. Do a search for something and identify the most common type of return you get that you don’t want. What do most of them have in common? Prices? Wording or phrases? Exclude those, or add to your search a phrase none of them use. If you want to know how how expensive Ireland feels right now compared to the U.S., but don’t want a currency converter or a Wall Street Journal article, try adding “we went” or “my last trip to” to the obvious search terms. Sometimes it helps.
Googling on a common name is close to hopeless. If all you know about John Smith is his name, you’ll never find the one you want. If you know something about him, you can try adding the appropriate words to Google on. If the person you want has a name that isn’t particularly common, but there’s a famous person with the same name, you’ll be deluged with websites about the famous person unless you can add words that specify the one you want or put in “-x -y -z”, where x, y, and z are words that are found in all websites about the famous person.
I just repeated the search from the other day, using a couple of your suggestions and got five hits on the exact person I was looking for.
Adding extra words and also a geographic location obviously made the difference. Seems so logical when you’re made aware of these things.
Consider a small portion of my ignorance fought!
As regards the bottomless pit of information used as instantaneous cites on this board, from whence do they spring?
Do the great debaters have gigs and gigs of related material stored in files on their computers, ready to be brought to the fore in an instant? Are they able to search that quickly?
I am often amazed at the depth and breadth of the material offered with little or no time lag in the thread.
Often, the key to speed is knowing that something exists in the first place. If you happened to encounter something once, you’ll know what to look for.
And, of course, the folks here on the Board include a lot of experts in specific fields, who may well have relevant information archived on their own hard drives.
One thing that’s annoying me lately is that Google knows where I am and sends me to Google Australia unless I specifically ask it to send me to their main site. This in itself isn’t the annoying thing - in fact, it’s quite useful as it gives me the option of searching Australian sites only, and this is a feature I use often (say for example looking up the Australian town of Texas, it is invaluable), but in recent times, it has developed an irritating habit, that when I choose to search the entire web, it artificially inflates the list of results with Australian sites. I don’t remember this being the case in the past, and I have never asked it to do this. Have people in other countries had similar problems? Does it piss you off too?
I suspect very few Straight Dopers have lots of information stored on their own computers. Many of us do have lots of books on the subjects that we’re interested in. A lot of what we know how to do is what websites to look at for many sorts of information. For a lot of things, just Google on “Wikipedia” and the subject, since often the information is summarized there quite well. For information about movies or TV shows, you should always go first to the Internet Movie Database. For general information about languages (but not translations), generally Ethnologue will answer your questions.
My best technique is the “six degrees of separation” method. If I can’t find what I want in the first few pages of results, even after varying search terms, I will come up with keywords of related subjects and look for a site that would likely have links in its pages somewhere that would in turn lead to what I’m after, maybe even taking a few jumps to get there.
This is good advice. I discovered a few years ago that I share my name with a moderately well-know artist. If, for some odd reason, I wished to discover information about myself, I would enter my name along with the artist’s field of endeavor, prefixed by a hyphen/minus sign to eliminate most of the hits on his name.
My home page is Google I don’t know for sure what “ncr” stands for, but I’m guessing “no country redirect”. If you use this url, you don’t get redirected to google.com.au
Another useful operator is “site:[partial url]” So for example if you just want hits from Australia (as I often do) you add “site:au” to your search. You can narrow it down further by putting more of a url in eg “site:straightdope.com” would only search that domain.
