Google User Guide

David Morrow Mobile County School System

dmorrow@mcpss.com

Introduction The World Wide Web, as indispensable as it has become, is something of a conundrum for many educators: Never have so many resources been so available, while at the same time so seemingly out of reach. Who hasn’t become frustrated when a search yielded thousands or even millions of “hits”? If you have ever been frustrated in your efforts to find the web resource that perfectly fits your needs, then this user guide is for you! Why Google? There are any number of search engines available to help you find what you are looking for on the Internet, but Google is arguably the best. It is easy to use and indexes (“searches”) over three billion web pages. With that in mind, this guide to searching the Internet will focus on Google. This user guide is divided into four main sections:

• A Search Engine Primer • A Quick Start Guide to Finding What You are Looking for on the Internet • Advanced Search Techniques – Search like a pro! • Appendix – Other resources to help you in your searching

Search Engine Primer

(Brief, but possibly more than you want to know) Technically, when you search the Internet, you are not really searching the Internet! When you use a search engine, programs called “crawlers”, “bots”, or “spiders” have already searched millions - or even billions - of web pages and links between web pages. These programs have also already reported their findings back to other programs that, in turn, create a huge database, or index, of web pages. It is this database (sometimes called a catalog) that is searched when you use Google. In essence, when you perform your search, Google compares the words and phrases in your search request to web pages that it already knows about and returns to you a list of web sites that include the words and phrases you are looking for.

When is a search engine not a search engine? When it is a directory. Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com) is a directory (or was – Yahoo! now incorporates a search engine into its searches, along with its directory). A directory differs from a search engine in that a directory is compiled by human operators rather than the automated “crawlers” used by search engines. Consequently, directories generally index a smaller number of web pages than a search engine. When presented with a very general search (dog, for instance), a directory may yield thousands of results. A true search engine – like Google – will yield millions! This huge difference is due to the fact that a search engine is listing all of the web sites that its spider programs have found that contain the word dog while a directory is listing all of the sites that its researchers have examined and determined to be about dogs. Again, maybe more than you care to know about search engines and directories, but understanding a little about how they work should help you phrase your searches. A Quick Start Guide to Finding What You are Looking for on

the Internet For whatever your purpose is, there is probably a “perfect” web page out there – somewhere. All that is keeping you from finding it are the words and phrases that you type into Google’s search box. If you are too general, you may wind up with a head-spinning number of results. Let’s see how that happens by searching for “dogs”. First, go to Google: Open your web browser program (Internet Explorer, in this case). Go to the Google homepage by typing “www.google.com” into the address bar and hitting the “enter” key on the keyboard. This is what you should see:

Address Bar

Search Box

Type “dogs” (case doesn’t matter – to Google, “dogs” is the same as “DOGS” or even “dOgS”) into the search box and click on the “Google Search” button. Your screen should now look something like this:

If you scroll down the page, you can read descriptions of the first ten sites Google located and decide if any seem to meet your needs. One problem, however, is that you are looking at the first ten of about 14,700,000 pages! While Google does claim that its software ranks your search results according to each site’s importance and relevance to your search terms, 14,700,000 are way too many. Even if your “perfect page” is in the top 1% of Google’s results, it could still be number 147,000! 14,700,000 pages!?! What’s going on? Your results include every web page - of the more than 3 billion web pages that Google has cataloged - that contains the word dog. Dog food, dog pound, hot dogs, and Jo-Jo the dog-faced boy will all be included in your results! Time to narrow your search! Include words in your search that would be on the kind of web page you are looking for. Try the following searches and see how the number of resulting web pages drops as we become more specific:

german shepherd 992,000 pages – All of the pages indexed by Google that include both words, german and shepherd, but not necessarily in that order or even next to each other. German restaurants owned by people named Shepherd would be included in these results, although Google’s ranking software would probably keep pages about the dog breed near the top of the results. We can immediately cut out

almost a half a million irrelevant pages just by putting quotation marks around our two-word phrase, like this:

“german shepherd” 497,000 pages – still too many, but we have now included only those pages which include the words german and shepherd next to each other and in that order – as a phrase. The use of quotation marks to narrow searches to specific phrases is a powerful tool! Include other words and phrases that will narrow your results to a more manageable number:

“german shepherd” puppy “grooming tips” 390 pages – this is the sort of search that might be conducted by the new owner of a German shepherd puppy, seeking information about how to care for it. 390 pages is a much more manageable number, and the first ten pages listed in Google’s results should provide the desired information.

Try to narrow the results even further by including other words and phrases, such as bathing, shampoo, nails, etc – or any others that would be included in a great page about taking care of German shepherd puppies. You can also exclude specific words and phrases by including them in your search with a minus sign immediately in front of them. This search:

“roy rogers” –“dale evans” would return all the pages that refer to people named Roy Rogers but with no reference to Dale Evans. Probably few of the pages listed would mention the

famous singing cowboy. Any page that talked about that Roy would have to talk about Dale! If she’s not mentioned, it’s probably about a different Roy Rogers.

Don’t waste time with “the next page” By default, Google will include descriptions and links to ten web sites on each page of results. If you don’t find what you are looking for within these first ten, don’t bother reading the next page – just conduct a better search! You can waste a lot of time hoping that what you are looking for is on “the next page”! Quick Start Guide Main Points (review):

• Be specific! – Think about the words and phrases that would be included in the type of resource you are looking for and include them in your search.

• Use quotation marks! – You can narrow your search to include specific

phrases.

• Don’t go to the next page! – If what you are looking for is not one Google’s first page of returns, refine your search.

Advanced Search Techniques The information in the Quick Start Guide will likely be all you will need for many of your searches. If, however, you want to join the ranks of the power searchers, you need to explore Google’s advanced search features and Advanced Search Page The following tasks are carried out by typing the given command and your keyword into the Google search box.

Domain search (keyword site:domain) Useful for confining searches to a particular domain. For instance, to find web pages that mention rockets, but only within NASA’s web sites, type the following:

rockets site:www.nasa.gov URL search (allinurl:keyword) Helpful if you can remember part of a site’s address. If you know that the web site you are looking for had both dog and cat in the address, try this search:

allinurl:dog cat Title search (intitle:keyword) If you remember part of a page’s title, Shakespeare for instance, you can perform the following search:

intitle: Shakespeare Backwards links (link:url) Sometimes you may want to know what pages are linked to a particular page. If you are trying to determine a site’s credibility, it may help to know who is interested enough to link to it. Read the article, “Teaching Zack to Think”, listed in the appendix of this guide for a good case study. The following search tells you what pages have links to www.missouri.edu:

link:www.missouri.edu These commands can be combined. Look at the following search:

inurl:dogs “german shepherd” –poodles Results would only include pages that mentioned German shepherds, but not poodles, and that included dog in the address. There are other such commands, but another of the nice features of Google is an Advanced Search Page that greatly simplifies these and other searching tasks. To get there from the Google home page, just click on “Advanced Search”:

The Advanced Search Page looks like this (if you scroll all the way down):

The options on the Advanced Search Page allow the searcher to, among other tasks:

• Include key terms and phrases • Exclude key terms and phrases • Limit searches to pages written in any one of thirty-five languages • Limit searches to certain file types • Stipulate how recently a site must have been updated • Search for keywords in a page’s text, title, or address – or even in links to

a page • Restrict searches to specific domains • Filter searches to exclude pornographic material • Shop • Find pages that are similar to a given page • Find pages that are linked to a given page

Spend a little time exploring this page and you will soon be able to quickly find what you are looking for! If one picture is worth a thousand words, then what about 59,000 pictures of puppies? Google just keeps getting better! Google Image Search allows you to limit your search results to only pictures! Click on the Images tab:

Which will bring you to the Images Search Page:

Type puppies:

Awww!

Google Image Search gives you pictures! Nothing but pictures! JPEGs and GIFs, to be exact. Any of the images you locate, by the way, may be subject to copyright law, which is not the subject of this user guide! There is so much more that you can do with Google – spend some time exploring!

Appendix

(A few additional resources to help you become a better searcher.) www.searchenginewatch.com The latest news and tips concerning search engines and searching http://www.anovember.com/articles/zack.html “Teaching Zack to Think” An eye-opening article by Alan November dealing with discernment of Internet material. Illustrates the importance of the link: command. http://toolbar.google.com/ From here you can download the Google toolbar, which allows you to perform many of Google’s search functions from any web page. Great tool! http://www.google.com/language_tools Google’s Language Tools page. Here you can limit searches to specific languages and countries, translate web pages from and into numerous languages, and even translate imported text from and to numerous languages.