A GUIDE TO GOOGLE

September 4, 2002
George Martins

Google, www.google.com ,has been acclaimed as the best search engine with some 2.5 billion pages of the Internet winning the PCWORLD best product of the year, that includes hardware or software, in its July 02 issue and the ONLY search engine to meet approval of the FTC ruling that search engines separate sponsored or paid sites(MSN being one of many in violation). Google is the most popular index type search engine. Following are some information and tips for its efficient use, some garnered from the article in Yahoo Internet Life magazine-go to www.yil.com to locate the google article in the Jun 02 issue.

1. EXPLORE THE HOME PAGE. There are 4 general areas to search: WEB index pages, IMAGES, GROUPS, and DIRECTORY. The most common used is the WEB pages, photos are found on IMAGES, finding interested forums are in GROUPS and Yahoo type DIRECTORY finds categrories. To the right of the entry box are three approaches to searches: ADVANCED SEARCH to put qualifiers, PREFERENCES, best for making all your found searches in ENGLISH(do it next time if you haven't already), also you can decide on the number of sites per search page and the kind of filtering action you want, and LANGUAGE TOOLS for searching in other languages. The most used button is GOOGLE SEARCH while I'M FEELING LUCKY goes to a single site which may not be of use. And there even are more links to explore at the bottom of the home page.

2. SIMPLE AND ADVANCED SEARCHES OF THE WEB. Seaching the word allergy will get some 800,000 sites in a fantastic less than a second of time. Click on an underlined link to read that page and subequent links. Use the back and forward button on the browser to go back and forth. At bottom one goes to other sets of 10 sites by clicking a number. Any page can be saved on your computer and/or printed. ragweed allergy finds some 13,000(note that the sponsored or paid links are indicated at right) but "ragweed allergy" requires the two word phrase and garners some 1000 sites. Advanced searching requires Boolean qualifiers like AND, OR, NOT, +, -. Allergy +ragweed requires both words in the site and gets the 13,000 but allergy +ragweed - tree removes all sites with the first two words but not tree and finds some 10,000 sites. Even more refined is the Advanced Search link above the entry box.where some 10 options are available.

3. SEARCHING IMAGES, GROUPS, AND DIRECTORIES. Ragweed will find over 1000 IMAGES which can be enlarged, saved-as any searched page-, some 1800 GROUPS or forum entries-more on GROUPS later, and 93 DIRECTORIES.

4. ADDING THE TOOL BAR TO YOUR BROWSER SCREEN. The new Google Toolbar saves clicks and increases your ability to find information from anywhere on the web and takes only seconds to install. When the Google Toolbar is installed, it automatically appears along with the Internet Explorer toolbar. This means you can quickly and easily use Google to search from any website location, without returning to the Google home page to begin another search. It is easily downloaded but requires Windows 95-XP and IE 5 or later.

5. BROWSING NEWS GROUPS. Newsgroups, in olden times called USENET, are forums to read posted questions and answers made by individuals in a group of common interests. To survey the hundreds of groups go to groups.google.com and click on one of the 10 main directories which house very many forums and some 700 million messages. This author in involved in digital photography and is a daily visitor to rec.photo.digital with some 500,000 messsages, glancing at about 100 of the latest each day. When a message is selected its thread tree is seen at the left and one can match responses. For example post #2 will answer #1, #3 may answer #2, while #4 may answer #1etc. To post a new message or a message in answer to one already posted one must register, and ,yes, it means giving your email address which may result in more spam. Giving your email address in a HOTMAIL account may direct spam to that address.

6. QUERIES TO NEWSGROUPS. This author recently purchase a Canon wide format inkjet printer (13x19in.) and did a google group search for information on the printer. Searching s9000 while in rec.photo.digital but searching ALL groups found some 2,500 posts and information to justify the purchase. Sorting by date puts the most recent relevant post first.

7. GOOGLE YOURSELF. You can check your online identity find photos of yourself. The article in YIL said putting in credit card numbers might find info in the wrong places and cause you to take action correcting them.

8. FIND PHONES AND MAPS OF PEOPLE. I put my first and last name, town and state and got my phone number, zip, and links to a Yahoo or Mapquest map of my house location. If you know the telephone number of any person then inserting it will get you info of that person.

9. USE GOOGLE AS DICTIONARY AND THESAURUS. Put a word like endogenus and the search will correct your spelling then offer at the top underlined word the definition and the use of a thesaurus.

Besides GOOGLE there are other ways: from PCWORLD june 2002
1. NEW SEARCH ENGINES. WiseNut at www.wisenut.com and Teoma www.teoma.com
2. INVISIBLE WEB SEARCH. Infomine at infomine.ucr.edu and Resource Discoverry Network at www.rdn.ac.uk and the Librarians' Index to the Internet at www.lii.org
3. SUPER SEARCH. Use a single web site to scour several search engines: Metacrawler www.metacrawler.com Surfwax www.surfwax.com and Beaucoup www.beaucoup.com
4. PERIODICALS. FindArticles.com and MagPortal.com