Gordaen’s Blog

In this day-and-age of Googling and increased information accessibility, I’m frequently amazed at the people who don’t effectively use search engines. The first cases I saw of this were back when Yahoo! was the search engine and HotBot was useful rather than atrocious. People would type in a complete URL into the Yahoo! search box rather than just typing it into browser’s address field. Fortunately, I don’t see that as often, but I still see people making limited use of search capabilities.

This entry is largely about Google, but many of the functions apply to other search engines as well. We’ll start with the basics.

If you’ve ever searched for something like the movie with that guy with planes and the snakes, you may have noticed that six of the ten words you typed in were not used (the, with, that, with, and, the). That allows Google to search much faster, because nearly every site contains those excluded words and they don’t help your results. That means it is best to just type in the main words of what you are looking for, but if you need one of those words to be included, add a plus in front of the search word. Thus, searching for Am I having a heart attack? gives you different results than Am +I having a heart attack?.

You may have also noticed that you see a “The ‘AND’ operator is unnecessary - we include all search terms by default.” The word “and” is another common word, so you wouldn’t need to include it. In the past, keywords rather than page content determined much of the results, so using “AND” meant the results had to include the two keywords. This is largely unnecessary in Google, but you can still make use of the “OR” operator. For instance, searching for babies OR toddlers will give pages that contain either term. They don’t have to have both terms, but they can.

If you search for john jacob jingleheimer smith, you’ll see results pretty close to what you want, but you’ll probably see “Schmidt” quite a bit. If you wanted the specific phrase, you could search for it with quotes like “john jacob jingleheimer smith” and see more relevant results. Without quotes, the individual words are searched for; with quotes, the phrase is searched for. This is especially useful for names. Also notice that capitalization is not important for the search terms in Google, so type the words whatever way is fastest for you.

Okay, so those are pretty basic search engine features that a lot of people know already, but there are plenty more features. You can add a tilde (~) to the front of a word to search for synonyms. In our first search, changing “movie” to “~movie” would also search for “cinema” and other related words. You can also search for number ranges by using two periods. For example, politician liar 1993..2006 will return articles about political liars between the year 1993 and 2006 (hmm, over 65 million results, I wonder why that is…).

There are a lot of special query words that you add to a word with a colon. For instance, cache:whitehouse.gov will show the version of the site that Google has cached. The other operators are mostly self-explanatory. You can use link (find what pages link to the page you specify), related, info, define, stocks, site (for only looking at results on a specific site), allintitle (requires all of the search words to be in the title of each result), intitle (requires at least one of the search words to be in the titles of the results), allinurl (requires all search words to be in the url), inurl (hopefully you are getting the picture…), date (restrict to specified number of months), safesearch (exclude adult content), phonebook, etc..

Google can also act as a calculator. Simply search for the math problem like 911 * 2356. You can use “^” for powers (e.g. “2^3 = 8″) and use “X root of” for roots (e.g. “4th root of 92″). Google can also do sin, cos, tan, log, exp (exponential functions), and a whole lot more that you’ll never use. To do conversions, use “X in Y” (e.g. “1 mile in kilometers” or you could do “miles per kilometer“). Google even understands certain units like the astronomical unit or the speed of light (e.g. “speed of light * 3“).

Whew, this post is long, and I haven’t hit anywhere near all of what you can use the search engine for. Try just typing in a street address with a city and state. You can even type in the three letters of an airport plus “airport” and have a link at the top to the conditions there (try “sea airport“). You can use Google for just about anything, even a dictionary. If you want to know more about the features of Google, I’m sure you know how to search for such knowledge now.