OLLI Workshop : Beyond The Basics of Google Searching April 2009

April 24, 2009 OLLI Presented by Sheila A Lafferty

Appeared on the internet scene September 1998

In a world of portals, they focused on searching

1 trillion unique URLs (July 2008); Google indexes about 40 million urls

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/25/googles-misleading-blog-post-on-the-size-of-the-web/

Circa 1997 search engines

Google: then and now

Google 61.9% 7.5 billion search queries were conducted with Google Search

Yahoo 20.5% 2.5 billion search queries

Windows Live (MSN) 8.9%

AOL

Ask

searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3630718

Crawler search engines - searches page titles and content with spiders and adds them to its index

Directories -based on subjective evaluation by humans.

Examples: Librarian’s Internet Index www.lii.org

About.com

WWW Virtual Library vlib.org

Google Directory http://www.google.com/dirhp

A. Phrases -Searches for your keywords as a phrase so word order matters

B. Google uses word A djacency - the words you enter in the search box will display pages with those words near each other

C. Google uses Weights -More use of your keywords on a page will cause the page to rank higher

D. PageRank - Citations: more times a page is cited, it is ranked higher

Source: Google 201-Patrick Crispen, CSU

Start Narrow - use as many terms or keywords as possible

Try and use Exact phrases

Trim the URL to find more pages on the same website

Find Similar webpages to ones that you like

Source:http://webquest.sdsu.edu/searching/ fournets .htm

http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer=112668

The title: The first line of any search result is the title of the webpage.

The snippet: A description of or an excerpt from the webpage.

The URL: The webpage's address.

Cached link: A link to an earlier version of this page. Click here if the page you wanted isn't available .

Note: Sponsored links appear on the top and to the right of the results

Web, Images, Maps, News, Shopping, Gmail, more

more…Video, Groups, Books, Scholar, Finance, Blogs

…… YouTube, Calendar, Photos, Documents, Reader, Sites

Even more>>Alerts, Checkout, Google Chrome, Custome Search, Desktop, Earth, Google Health, iGoogle, Notebook,…

One of the largest databases- “billions of images”

Google searches for images by the file extensions, text around the image, the image caption and more.

Use the Advanced Image Search page to refine your search. Options include size, coloration, filetypes, domain, filters and more. New: Filters for faces, news content, clip art, line drawings, photo content

Now includes LIFE photo archive: http://images.google.com/hosted/life

Search by address, zip code, airport code, landmark, business

Dragable map (click on map with mouse and move)

Views: street, traffic, map, satellite, terrain

Detailed directions

Keyboard shortcuts: arrow keys, pgup, pgdn

Scroll wheel zooming

Single search box convenience Torrington ct to Middletown ct; candy in Bolton ct

Street view : 401 Bleecker St, New York, NY

Google Map Mashups: Map + Public Library locations Traffic view of Los Angeles Custom maps with My Maps http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/

Search and browse 4,500 news sources. Updated continuously.

Past 30 days of Web-based news sites

International versions of Google news –scroll down to the bottom of the Google news page

News Archives Search: links to fee based sources; Advanced options; Timeline (ie Hartford Circus Fire, Economist doom)

Option to add local news and RSS

Google News Archives

News Archives

New Articles

Timeline

Products, Google's shopping search engine helps users locate sellers that offer the item you want to find

Objective price comparisons- unlike bizrate, shopping.com, nextag.com which display only paid retailer sites

Refresh the page to see what people are looking for online

Google’s version of YouTube , the more popular site which Google also owns. The focus of Google Video is on search.

Google Video discontinued video uploads

Most active videos designated as Hot, Recommended, AOL videos

Search the full text of books to find ones that interest you and learn where to buy or borrow them. Includes some magazine titles

Google partnered with research libraries and publishers to make digital copies of their collections and allow the text of those digital copies to be searched online – 7 Billion+ titles

Full page views (pre 1923), limited views, snippets, links to reviews

My Library options for Google account holders

Google Books

Full page views (pre 1923), limited views, snippets, links to reviews

My Library options for Google account holders

Google Groups is a free service which helps people form online communities based around shared interests.

Google Groups contains the entire archive of Usenet discussion groups dating back to 1981 . More than 1 billion postings in the Usenet archive, and now you can also stay in touch with friends, family and colleagues by creating your own groups, mailing lists, and email newsletters.

Use the advanced groups to refine your search- date searches

http://groups.google.com/advanced_group_search http://groups.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=timeline.html

Search scholarly journals, articles, papers, theses and books

Locate the complete paper through your library or on the web and where paper is cited

Learn about key papers in any area of research

Advanced options : restrict by author, publication, date and subject area

Links to items in library databases when connected using a library network

Library Search = Worldcat.org

Searches Google Blogger sites and other blogs

Blog topics display on the left

Advanced Search Options available plus: inblogtitle: inposttitle: inpostauthor: blogurl:

Subscribe to Blog search results: Blog Alerts, RSS

http://www.google.com/patents

http://finance.google.com/

http://base.google.com/- buying and selling online

Special searches: universities, government, apple, microsoft and more

AND is a default- keywords are combined automatically

Cats and dogs

Use quotes to find phrases “aging in place”

“ identity theft”

“ air quotes”

OR (caps only) = | (pipe) Finds webpages with either keyword boating OR yachting

-keyword will eliminate pages with the keyword

+keyword will require webpages with the keyword as an exact MATCH

Bass –fish

Mp3 –ipod

+how

Google results include word variants and automatic stemming

child children child’s

plant plants planting

*Google does not match variants when you search a single keyword

~ in front of your keywords will retrieve the keyword and synonyms of the keywords

~food ~facts

will search for food facts, nutrition, cooking information

~food –food will search for synonyms of food but not the word food

site:

.Gov, .edu, .mil, .com, .aero, .biz, .com, .coop, .info, .museum, .name, .net, .org, or .pro

“ credit card fraud” site:org

Use filetype: or advanced search screen with with limited search options Adobe Portable Document Format (pdf) Adobe PostScript (ps) MacWrite (mw) Microsoft Access (mdb) Microsoft Excel (xls or xlsx) Microsoft PowerPoint (ppt or pptx) Microsoft Word (doc or docx) Microsoft Works (wks, wps, wdb) Microsoft Write (wri) Rich Text Format (rtf) Shockwave Flash (swf) Text (ans, txt) "household budget” filetype:xls

There is a 32* word search limit ; google skips over the following stop words: a, about, an, and, are, as, at, be, by, from, how, i, in, is, it, of, on, or, that, the, this, to, we, what, when, where, which, with

*There is a 10 word limit in scholar, groups,& news

Use * as a Wildcard

Cry * river

intitle: retrieves information from the title of a webpage

Allintitle:

intitle:”family history”

inurl: retrieves websites that include the keyword in the url (uniform resource locator or webaddress)

Allinurl:

inurl:american memory

intext: searches the body text of a webpage and ignores titles

link: locates webpages that link to a specific url

link:www.lifehacker.com

cache: finds a copy of the webpage when it was last searched by google

cache:cnn.com

Note: You can also click on cached under each link in the search results display if the the site does not load- SAVE the page???

Info: finds information about the website and displays it.

Info:c-span.org

related: finds webpages that are similar to others

related:www.google.com

Finds: www.yahoo.com, www.altavista.com, www.excite.com and more

Automatically suggests alternative spelling

Links to dictionary definition

phonebook:, rphonebook:, bphonebook:

FN or FI (first name or first initial), LN (last name), city FN (FI), LN, state FN (FI), LN, area code FN (FI), LN, zip code phone # including area code (ex: 111-222-3333) LN, city, state LN, zip code

Type weather and the location

weather tokyo

weather 06790

Google provides translations of a variety of non-English web pages. (Italian, French, Spanish, German, and Portuguese )

http://www.google.com/translate_t

http://www.google.com/language_tools

Enter a street address and zip code or street and city/state and get map of the address at the top of your search results

855 university dr 06790

A. Enter keyword and enter or click google search

Google will highlight the search term in the statistics bar with a hypertext link if in a dictionary

Define:”peer to peer”

Define:plagiarism

B. define: keyword will retrieve definitions from a variety of web resources

Enter the ticker symbols to retrieve stock information from Google Finance, Yahoo Finance,MSN Money, AOL Finance, CNN Money, Reuters

stocks: IBM

Google is handy when looking for quick factual tips

Population san francisco

Birthplace mark twain

Birthday jimmy carter

President france

UPS Tracking numbers

FedEx tracking numbers

USPS tracking numbers

Vehicle ID (VIN) numbers

UPC codes

Telephone area codes

207

Telephone numbers

8604890000

Patent numbers

“ patent 5123123 ”

FCC equipment IDs

Google via Cell Phone

Call 800-GOOG-411 (Businesses only)

+ - * /

^ exponentiation (raise to a power of) 8^2

th root of 5 th root of 32

% of 20% of 100

More?

http://www.google.com/help/calculator.html

Numrange searches for results containing numbers in a given range

Add two numbers, separated by two periods, with no spaces, into the search box along with your search terms

“ new haven” 1800..1850

Mp3 player $100..$200

built-in currency converter, simply enter the conversion using “in”

3.5 USD in Canadian dollars

1 cup in teaspoons

1 meter in miles

Constants

Pi

Speed of light

Radius of the earth

Information about a flight

AA 1259 ; display links to flight tracking sites

FAA registration number for aircraft

n199ua

Airport conditions

BDL airport, IAD airport

The "I'm Feeling Lucky™" button takes you directly to the first Google search result

In case you can not remember the shortcuts- use Advanced Search Scroll down to use Topic Specific Search Engines

With the Google toolbar, Google search available whenever your browser is open

Versions available for both IE and Firefox

Pop-up blocker (allow popups from trusted sites)

Highlight search terms on a page

http://toolbar.google.com/ to learn more

A search engine to information on your computer and from the web

Full text search of your email, files, music, photos, chats, Gmail, web pages that you've viewed, and more.

Offers Sidebar and Google Gadgets

Why use it? A google search box is always available from the Taskbar

http://www.googlealert.com/

Six types of alert searches: "News", "Web", "Blogs", "Comprehensive", "Video" and "Groups“

Results sent to any email address

GMail - free email w/ many features “never delete a message” Google Finance -Business info, news, and interactive charts Blogger - the Google owned blogging service Google Calendar - private and public ; sync with Outlook Google Sites - website builder using your google account Google Analytics - track statistics for your websites Google Reader- a tool for gathering, reading, and sharing all the interesting blogs and websites you read on the web Google Docs –spreadsheets, docs & presentations Custom Search- create your own mini search Picasa - Photo organizer and editor

Yahoo.com Ask.com Live.com (by msn) Lycos.com Alltheweb.com (by Yahoo) Aolsearch.com (by Google)