Best Universities in Pakistan 2021: Environmental studies
Googling the World Wide Web
1. 1
Googling the World Wide Web
Dr. Khalid Mahmood
Professor of Information Management
University of the Punjab
2. Google – Web search engine
Owned by Google Inc.
Originally developed by Larry Page and
Sergey Brin in 1997.
The most-used search engine on the World
Wide Web, handling more than three billion
searches each day.
The main purpose of Google Search is to hunt
for text in publicly accessible documents
offered by web servers.
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3. All search terms count; for example,
A search in Google will find all pages
containing the words “compact,” “folding”
and “bicycle”.
You don’t need to include the word “AND” in-
between your search terms; when searching
Google the “AND” is implied, this is called an
implicit AND.
All search terms count
compact folding bicycle
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4. Some common words are considered stop
words in Google; stop words generally
don’t add meaning to the search terms
For example: the, on, where, how and
certain single digits and letters
Because this search includes stop words,
Google will only look for pages that
contain “read,” “London” and “tourist”
Stop words
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What to read for a London tourist
5. Google is not case-sensitive, it
will pull up results which are
both upper and lower case.
Not case-sensitive
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6. If you search Google won’t find
Cheap Inexpensive
TV Television
Effects Influences
Children Kids
Car Automobile
Search terms match up exactly
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7. Google will automatically find pages that contain
words that are similar to some or all of your search
terms.
It is called “stemming”
Similar words match
If you search Google will match
Child Child
Children
Children’s
Bicycle Bicycle
Bicycles
Bicycle’s
Bicycling
Bicyclists
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8. To search for a phrase, a proper name,
or a set of words in a specific order you
need to put them in double quotes.
Quoted phrases
Use quotes for For example
Speech search syntax “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all me
are created equal” Martin Luther King Speech.
Proper names “Lucille Ball”
Common words that are normally ignored “To be or not to be”
To stop automatic stemming “Favorite book”
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9. Precede each word you don’t want to appear
in any result with a minus “-” sign.
Do not insert a space between the “-” and
the word you want to exclude.
Excluding terms
If you search Google won’t find
Dolphins -Football Pages on the Dolphins
Football team
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10. Find synonyms by preceding the term
with a “~”, which is known as the tilde
or synonym operator
Finding synonyms
If you search Google will find
~inexpensive Inexpensive
Cheap
Affordable
Low Cost
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11. If you want Google to pull up pages
containing any instead of all of your search
terms, use the “OR” operator.
The OR needs to be in upper case, if not
Google will treat it as a search term not as an
operator.
For example,
Expanding search
Curriculum OR syllabus
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12. The asterisk “*” operator is used to match
one or more words in a phrase.
Google treats this as a place holder for a
word or more then one word.
Using wildcard
If you search Google will find
“Google * my life” Pages that contain a phrase
that starts with Google and
ends with my life.
“Google ruined my life”
“Google runs my life”
“Google is my life”
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13. Limiting search to titles
This search returns sites with the word test in
the title and results anywhere in the
document.
In this example there are much fewer “hits”
when both terms (test AND results) must be
found in the title of the page.
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intitle:test results
allintitle:test results
14. Limiting search to site or domain
Enter search terms then qualifier “site:”
Example:
“khalid mahmood” site:pu.edu.pk
Finds this name on the University of the Punjab
website
dinosaur site:edu
Finds dinosaur on all educational websites
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15. Searching specific file type
You can specify a type of document to
search.
Examples:
pdf – Adobe readable files
doc – Microsoft Word documents
jpg, gif, tif – graphics, photos
ppt – Microsoft PowerPoint presentations
“online searching” filetype:ppt
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