Newsletter #85 Google Tips & Tricks

Created on 24/02/04

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The last newsletter (24th February, 2004) was "Automated Bots: Good or Bad?"

On February 17th Google announced that their index covered an amazing 6 billion items, including 4.28 billion Webpages, 880 million images and 845 Usenet messages.

Google is such a dominant part of the landscape that it has become a verb. As Joel Achenbach of The Washington Post says: "In the beginning -- before Google -- a darkness was upon the land." Google is pretty important.

We thought that since most of you use Google almost every day it was worthwhile to help you to "Google" more efficiently.

First some general stuff. When you enter words into the Google (http://www.google.com) search box, Google returns the Webpages that contain all the words in your query. Therefore to narrow down your search it is just a matter of adding more words. It is important to choose these words wisely and to be as specific as possible. Using the convention that whatever you type into Google is within the square brackets: eg. [really nice places to stay in LA] won't be as productive as [hotels Los Angeles].

Google is not case sensitive and certain common words such as a, about, are, at, by, from, I, in, of, how, la, that, the, this, to, will, who, what, where, and when as well as single digits and single letters, are excluded from searches.

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Other things you can do are:

• By using double quotation marks "" around a phrase Google will search for that phrase on Webpages rather than look for the individual words. For example searching for [United States of America] finds approx 8.26 million pages, ["United States of America"] 4.39 million.
  
  
• You can use the plus sign [+] in front of a common word or single digit/letter to get them included within the search eg [Star Wars, Episode +I]. Specifying the minus sign [-] will exclude the word from the search.
  
  
• You may want to search not only for a particular keyword, but also for its synonyms. You can do so by adding the tilde sign ~ before the words. Eg to search for food facts as well as nutrition and cooking information type [~food~facts].
  
  
• The "I'm Feeling Lucky" button takes you straight to the first page that Google has returned. Eg try [Stanford] and click "I'm Feeling Lucky". You'll be taken straight to the homepage of Stanford University - well when this was written it does.
  
• If you type [define:] and the phrase or word you want to define, Google will attempt to find a definition. Eg [define: black hole]
  
  
• When the Google spiders roam the Web they take a snapshot of each page they find as a backup. When you do a search you will often see a link "Cached" at the bottom of the Webpage description. This is a copy of the Webpage when the Google spider found it and may not necessarily be the up to date version.
  
  
• The word [site] followed by a colon lets you to restrict your search to a specific site. For example, to find information about Windows XP on Microsoft's site, enter: [windows xp site:www.microsoft.com]
  
  
• One that is very worthwhile is to know who links to your site (according to Google) - go [link:www.yourcompany.com].
  
  
• Google Calculator: To use Google's built-in calculator function, simply enter the expression you'd like evaluated in the search box and hit the Enter key. The calculator can evaluate mathematical expressions involving basic arithmetic, more complicated mathematics, units of measure and conversions and physical constants. Try [5*15-10], [10 miles in kilometres] or [sqrt 225].

If all this is too much (and there is more) and you don't think you can remember it all either print this page or visit the Google Advanced Search page http://www.google.com/advanced_search.

Particularly if you are on a high-speed connection, Google at your fingertips is the quickest way to find almost all types of information.

"It's the collapse of inconvenience," says Siva Vaidhyanathan, assistant professor of culture and communication at New York University.

Newbies

For previous tips visit the Newbie Hot Tips page.

Power Users

The Windows XP Error reporting should have been a great invention. But in practice, it's rather annoying- even though it is only one mouse click. To get rid of it, go to Start/Run. Type "msconfig", hit "enter", and click the "Services" tab. Clear the "Error Reporting Service" check box, then click OK. You can choose to reboot your system now or later.

For previous tips visit the Power Hot Tips page.

If you want to listen to your radio station via an Internet connection check out "Radio-Locator, the most comprehensive radio station search engine on the internet." With links to over 10,000 radio station Webpages and over 2500 audio streams from radio stations in the U.S. and around the world, you're bound to find something you like! http://www.radio-locator.com/

If you use Microsoft Access, Excel, PowerPoint, and/or Word (probably 90% of you), you might like to check out the free downloads at The Office Experts. Some useful stuff here like PowerPoint templates and a simple financing system that runs on Excel. http://www.theofficeexperts.com/downloads.htm

No new articles this month.

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Best wishes

Alex Garden

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