Google is a great, almost sel-explantory, invention but I get the impression from some of the questions in GQ and elsewhere that many people don’t know how to use it well.
I can’t count the number of times I have found something in second that someone claims they have been looking for all day.
My tips:
This is a simple one. Someone just claimed that they couldn’t figure out what “OAC” means in GQ. I went to Google and typed “define OAC”. There was the answer. Typing “define” and then the phrase is often very useful.
Here is one that I have never heard mentioned elsewhere. For specific, difficult searches, imagine a specific phrase that you could imagine your ideal result containing. Someone once asked for the model of car GPS with the largest screen available. One could just search for “GPS” and perhaps “largest” but that pulls up all kinds of crap. What I did was Google “GPS” and the specific phrase “with the largest screen”. That pulled up the right answer immediately.
If you have a question, somebody else has probably asked it sometime, too. Try the “Ask Jeeves” approach of typing the question into Google. Lotsa times you’ll hit an “Ask the Expert” site or magazine column, or the keywords in your question will just get you the sites you’re looking for.
Something that has been almost insanely helpful for me is that google is a calculator and a unit converter.
Type “1200 in binary” (without the quotes), and it returns “10010110000”.
Type “5,830 * 192” and get “1 119 360”
Type “23948 miles in light years” and get “4.07382849 × 10^-9”
I sometimes use the kitchen-sink approach in more obscure searches. I’ll think of all the words that desribe a topic and type a bunch of them into the search - the more words, and the better they describe the topic, the more likely that I’ll hit a good page in the first 10 sites that Google returns. If I don’t get any good returns, then I’ll trim down the list and see if the search improves.
For example, in another thread, I was trying to come up with a good retelling of the joke about the waiter using tongs when at the urinal - I used the search string “joke about restaurant tongs bathroom” and had a bunch of good hits.
Also, I rarely go past the first 2 pages of links that Google suggests - if it hasn’t gotten it right by then, then I need to improve my search specifications.
Try the same searches with and without plurals. It may turn out some unexpected results.
Use double quotes to search for phrases that you want the search results to have.
Don’t be afraid to type in full sentences. For instance, I was doing a google search for “Japanese characters in Spirited Away” and I got the page with the relevant information.
Would anyone like to help me with this one? I have a concert recording of Harry Chapin, called “Big John’s Birthday”, on which it occurred, but that’s all the information I have on it. His bassist’s name was John Wallace. I searched for “Big John’s Birthday” and got hundreds of results for other guys named Big John having a birthday. No hits for the CD or the show. I searched for “John Wallace + Harry Chapin” and got no results. I looked at about 30 Harry Chapin websites. No mention of it. I entered “Harry Chapin + bootlegs” and got dozens of pages of peoples’ bootleg and CD collection lists on the web that contain Harry’s name, but not this recording. That was at least two hours wasted. Does anyone have any idea how I could find out a) when John Walker was born, or b) when this concert occurred?
Quotation marks are your friends. Using them vs. not using them can radically alter your search results.
Something I picked up while working as a fact-checker for a newspaper: it may seem a bit anal-retentive, but don’t trust the Google cache of a page. You search for something, and you get a result that looks promising. Click the actual link, and check the actual (presumably) active site it brings you to. The problem with the cache and the page summary is that they’re not nessecarily updated: the owner of the site may have discovered that Thing A is incorrect, updated it to be Thing B, but Google’s still showing Thing A.
In Google, the + sign does something different from what you seem to expect it to do.
You don’t need to use + or “and” in Google searches; if you enter more than one term, Google automatically searches for pages that include all of the terms.
The + sign is actually used to force Google to search for words that it typically ignores, such as “how,” “what,” “when,” single digit numbers, articles, prepositions, “I,” etc. So, for example, if you want to find pages containing the words when to change clocks, and just enter those words, Google just ignores “when” and “to” and finds pages with both change and clocks. You can force it to search for the words when and to by entering +when +to change clocks. If you go ahead and these different searches, then by looking at the bolded words on the search results page, you can see which words Google actually searched for.
The quotes force Google to look for the enclosed words together and in that order. Your search, John Wallace + Harry Chapin will do search for the words John, Wallace, Harry, and Chapin, together or apart, in any order. (The + does nothing, because Google doesn’t normally ignore the word “Harry”). Searching for “John Wallace” means you want documents only where John and Wallace appear side by side. Searching for “John Wallace” “Harry Chapin” finds pages that have John together with Wallace and Harry together with Chapin.
The word “glossary” often does the same. Many web sites have have glossary pages for their paritcular topic, where specialized words and phrases are defined.
Sometimes when I search for something, I get too many results to reasonably sift through, so I find the - feature to be very useful. For example, I could type this:
dragons -dungeons
And it would tell Google return me all results containing the word “dragons” which don’t also have the word “dungeons” on the page. Useful for sifting out all the D&D sites from the mythology sites. I also find it handy for getting rid of all the crappy vendor sites when doing hardware searches.
I also find myself using this a lot when I know the site, but I’m looking for something specific:
pornographic site:straightdope.com
All instances of “pornographic” on the SDMB home page. Great when the site in question doesn’t have a search engine or has a glitchy or substandard one.
I was helping my daughter with a homework assignment this weekend. She was looking for web pages on the topic of socialized medicine. We added “.gov” in order to get government sites.
I’ve often found that a search result gives me a web page that is supposed to contain my enquiry. Lots of times I just give up because I can’t see it.
Why doesn’t Google highlight the search terms?
I hope the OP doesn’t mind this slight hijack).
If you’re looking for a specific file type, add the file extension to your search: .pdf, .doc, .xls
And you can use the boolean operators AND and OR in your searches at google - but you need to put them in all caps. AND is not really necessary, since it’s the google default, but OR can be very useful.
When you have specific sections in your search, don’t be afraid to use parentheses - remember algebra and the first-outside-inside-last idea? Well, anything inside the () will be searched first, followed by what’s outside the (). Both these tips are useful when you’re searching for something like:
(cat OR cats OR feline OR felines) (vaccination OR rabies) .xls site:.gov
This got me down to 259 results - a much more manageable level than the 1.9 million I got when I didn’t have the .xls site:.gov portion.
And then the important thing to remember: just because you get a result from google, doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily the best information. Check where the information came from - is it someone’s personal page or from a government agency - basically who wrote it? You don’t want to end up citing a 6th grader’s paper that they put on the internet in your senior thesis!
