Prompted by Eric’s remark in another topic, here’s a couple of things you should know about Google searching: I’ll give some basic pointers at simple searches here, and then link you guys to a couple of pages where you can learn moar, yes? Yes. But before we start, a little word I want to be sure everyone knows the meaning: when I refer to the query, I’m talking about whatever you wrote on the search bar: put short, what you’re searching for. Well then. Lets get our hands dirty.
Google will search for each word separately, giving priority to those which come first, and also slightly prioritizing expressions over loose words. That is to say, if you search for pirate ship, it’ll give priority to results with “pirate ship”, then to results where both words show but not in order, then to results with “pirate” but not ship etc. Arr! If you want it to search for an expression only, and not its words loose, you put the whole expression between quote marks: “pirate ship” will treat “pirate ship” as a single word.
It might also happen to suggest a spelling correction. Even if you don’t take the suggestion, it’ll add the “corrected” version to your results. It’ll also include variations of your search words, such as declensions (plural etc.), verb conjugations, and alternative spellings (so that fortune-telling will also search for “fortune telling” and fortunetelling). If you want to avoid this, find the terms Google is “correcting” and place a plus sign in front of them, like +this.
If you want an even broader search, you can add the similarity operator (also known as tilde) to search terms: whereas nutrition will only look for that word itself, ~nutrition will also search for, say, “health” and “food”. You can also include specific alternative terms by means of the logical or operaror. color=#cc3333[/color] will search for “cats” or “dogs”, or both.
If you want to further restrict the search, on the other hand, you can do so by removing terms from it with the minus operator: searching for break prison will return boatloads of results about the TV series Prison Break. To avoid this, you can elliminate words like season and series, thus: break prison -series -season.
You can also combine these tricks, hence the search query I used when trying to find Gare’s book: ~amnesia (break|escape) (~jail|cell) book fiction -season -television.
Well there you go. This should work as a primer for power searching with Google. (Yahoo has some cool different tricks, depending on what I want to do, I use it rather than Google). For further reference, here’s an interactive Google guide page (which also has a great cheat sheet you can print); here’s a blog post on Google’s obscure features and some useful hacks, and last but not least, here’s a Google search.
