Bob Schneider Writer. Smart Computing-Editorial

Master The Web

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August 2001• Vol.12 Issue 8
Everybody’s Ga-Ga For Google Simple Searches, Great Results

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At a meeting of a users group we recently attended, the president began by asking members about what they liked on the Web. When he threw out the question “What’s your favorite search engine?” the response rang out like a Greek chorus: “Google!”

These users have a lot of company. According to Business Week, Google (http://www.google.com/) has captured 25% of the search engine market, not to mention more than a dozen awards from the computer press. Not bad for a search engine that’s been around only since 1998. What makes this engine so popular?

One key factor in Google’s success is its elegant simplicity. As the big search engines turned themselves into feature-laden portals, their home pages became a mish-mash of links, news, stock prices, banner ads, and you name it.

Not Google. The home page has a field into which you enter keywords, a couple of buttons to execute your search, a half-dozen unobtrusive links . . . and that’s about it. Even as Google expands its features, the crisp, sleek home page and simple search form remain. That means you’ll have to dig a bit to find some of Google’s other fine offerings. But keeping the home page tidy is a wise move, well worth the extra second or two it takes to drill to Google’s additional features and options.

An interface that’s easy on the eyes, however, doesn’t mean much if the engine doesn’t find what you want. Here again, though, Google continually surprises and delights new users, many of whom have grown accustomed to engines that return lots of false hits, especially for simple searches. Google, in contrast, has the canny ability to come up with sites that have exactly what you need, even when you search using just one or two keywords.

Indeed, unlike most engines, Google seems to know instinctively that when visitors search on a single keyword, such as cats, they’re probably not looking for the The Cats Meow cafeteria in Kalamazoo. Rather, they most likely want to know about cat breeds, cat shows, cat care, cat Web sites, and cat clubs. With a simple search for cats at Google, users could find all of this info by clicking a few of the top-listed links on the results page.

The simple Google home page has been warmly received by users turned off by cluttered search engine portals.

Do A Simple Search

Sound inviting? You can start using Google by entering one or more keywords in the search box on the home page. In a Google search, all the words you type in the search box must appear in the Web page, or Google won’t retrieve it as a hit. If you’re fond of Boolean operators, and few people are, you’ll recognize this as AND criteria.

After you enter your keywords, you have a choice of two buttons: Google Search and I’m Feeling Lucky. The Google Search button does just that, and for our money is your only choice.

What’s does I’m Feeling Lucky do? That takes you directly to what would have been the No. 1 ranked site on your results page, without showing you any of the hits from your search. It’s a nice gimmick, and it may have initially helped to distinguish Google as a superior search engine. But unless you’re someone who enjoys random, surprise-me searches, we wouldn’t use it. As good as Google is, we still thinks it pays to review at least the first three or four hits on the results page and select the best one, even for the most general searches. The few seconds saved by pressing I’m Feeling Lucky wouldn’t seem to offset the still-large possibility that the top-ranked site won’t meet your needs.

When you press Search, Google retrieves your results using its PageRank system (see the Fact Sheet sidebar for more details). With some search engines, it’s not always easy to tell whether the list of results was generated completely by the engine’s technology or whether a company has paid to include its site among the hits or place its site at or near the top of the results page.

At Google, that isn’t a problem. Depending on your search, there may be some paid-for links among your results, which are indeed located at the top of the page. But these entries are always distinguished by their colored background and are clearly labeled Sponsored Links. (For an example of these ads, type web hosting.) And at Google, no one can pay for premier placement; the order in which your hits are listed are always generated from its PageRank technology.

The Advanced Search Web form requires no knowledge of Boolean operators.

Opening Web Pages

Once Google retrieves your results, you can begin to explore the entries. Usually you’ll find what you’re looking for on the first page of results, but you can view additional pages of results by clicking the page numbers (or the Os in Google) at the bottom of the page.

Each of your hits will include at least three links:

•Most obvious and most important, a link to the Web page, indicated by its title. Click it, and the Web page opens in the same window.

•A link to the Cached page. After you have clicked the title link and explored the document, this link may prove extremely useful. Web pages often change after they are first indexed by the search engine. It’s not unusual to open a Web page and wonder, “Why in the world did the search engine retrieve this link?” When that happens, you can return to your results page and click the cached link to see just how the page looked when Google indexed it; the keywords in your search are highlighted in yellow. The cached page may be dated, so it pays (as always) to do your usual evaluation of a page’s probable accuracy and continuing relevancy before using its content.

•A link to Similar Pages. You’ll usually access this link on a return trip to the results page. If you’re already familiar with a Web page, you may want to click it right off the bat. As its name indicates, a click will display links to pages with similar content.

The Preferences page has options to exclude adult content and to open Web pages in a new window.

Improve Your Search

Google gives you a couple of ways to modify your searches if the first didn’t turn up quite what you had hoped.

Simple Search Helpers. Use the search form at the top of the results page to refine your keyword entry and search again. For example, you may decide that you could get better results if your keywords were always adjacent to one another. As in many other engines, you can surround words and numbers in quotations, such as “Microsoft Office,” to find those exact words in that order.

Or you may find that you’re getting unrelated hits because your keyword has several far-flung meanings. In that case, it may help to exclude documents by asking Google not to retrieve Web pages with certain words. You can do that by entering the word to be excluded and placing a minus (-) sign in front of it; you must leave a space after the preceding word. For example, type bear –market if you’re interested in grizzlies and pandas, rather than declining stock prices.

Advanced Web Search. If you hate dealing with search symbols and syntax, you’re by no means alone. You can avoid working with quotation marks, minus signs, and the like by clicking Advanced Search on the home page. You’ll get a jargon-free form to fine-tune your search. Besides searches for exact phrases and those excluding specified words, you can also ask Google to do a search on any of the words you include in the form (in Boolean speak, that’s OR criteria).

The Advanced Web Search form has other neat features. The Occurrences option is a great way to limit the hits on an unwieldy search. By opening the list box and choosing In The Title Of The Page, you’ll find only those Web pages where your search term appears in the title bar of the Web page window. Another choice in the Occurrences option will limit your keyword search to the URLs (uniform resource locator) of the documents.

You can also choose to retrieve (or exclude) Web pages from a certain site or domain. For example, say you’re searching for information on the Microsoft Office suite. Your hits are mostly coming from the Microsoft site, whose content you’ve pretty much exhausted. In the Domains option, open the list box and choose Don’t; in the text box, type microsoft.com. None of your hits will come from the Microsoft site. If you wanted only pages from the Microsoft site, there’s an Only option as well.

Preferences. Google lets you customize your search by clicking Preferences on the home page. Two items are of special interest. First, if you would like the Web page of any clicked link to open in a new browser window, you should enable the Results Window option. That means your results page will remain open in a separate window; you won’t have to keep clicking your Back button to view it.

Second, Google provides an option to exclude adult sites in your list of results. On the Preferences page, look for the SafeSearch Filtering option and click the enabling radio button.

To change these and other preferences (including foreign language options and number of results per page), be sure to click the Save Preferences button before you leave the Preferences page.

Using The Category Directory

As with many search sites, Google also contains a human-crafted Web site directory in addition to its search engine. In other words, Web sites are organized into a hierarchy, so if you’re looking for, say, sites on dinosaurs, you can start by clicking Science, then drill down successively to Earth Sciences, Paleontology, and Dinosaurs.

Why not just search for dinosaurs by keyword? You probably would, but sometimes a directory can be used effectively in conjunction with a keyword search. When you search by keyword, often your hits include a link for the category in which the site is located.

For example, suppose you did a keyword search on dinosaurs. The Dinosaurs: Facts and Fiction site (http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dinosaurs) is among your hits. Besides a link to the site, the entry also contains a link to the category Science > Earth Sciences > Paleontology > Dinosaurs. If you click that link, you can find sites further down in the hierarchy, such as dinosaur books or dinosaur movies. You could also move up in the hierarchy, such as back to Paleontology, and find sites on paleontologists.

Google uses the directory developed by the Open Directory Project (http://www.dmoz.com/), a volunteer effort of some 20,000 human editors. Although the Open Directory has received high marks over the years, lately there has been some criticism of its work. Nevertheless, the Open Directory still has to be considered one of the best directories on the Web.

The Google Toolbar

You may be unenthusiastic about downloading toolbars and other browser add-ons. Sometimes, it just doesn’t seem worth the effort involved to get the software installed and figure out how it works.

That’s not true of the Google toolbar. It gives you fast access to Google for both simple and advanced searches, and it also makes it easy to do site-only searches. It downloads quickly, and we had it up and running on Internet Explorer in a couple of minutes (currently, it only works in IE, versions 5.0 and later). You can display and hide it like any other toolbar from the View, Toolbars submenu.

Although most of the toolbar’s features can be found at the Google Web site, it also includes a couple of options that a visit to http://www.google.com/ won’t provide. According to a Google representative, one such option is the ability to highlight different terms in any page you visit, with different colors used to highlight multiple word queries.

Moreover, the main Google toolbar menu includes an Uninstall command so you can easily delete it. But it’s unlikely you’ll want to. Imagine for a moment it’s the year 2003, and our users group is still going strong. The President once again asks the assembled members, “What’s your favorite search engine?” Our suspicion is that the cry of “Google!” will be even more uniform, and even louder.

by Bob Schneider

Tips . . . For Using Google

Google searches are not case sensitive. So whether you’re searching for turkey the bird or Turkey the country, you should still enter turkey in all lowercase letters.

Similarly, Google does not use stemming, a technique some engines use to include minor variations on a word. Thus if you type pack, Google will return different results than if you typed packed or packing. Google also doesn’t use wildcards, so typing pack* won’t search for packed or packing either.

In the home page search form, you can have Google search for any of the words you type by including OR between them. Thus, type cats OR dogs to include all pages with cats, all pages with dogs, and all pages with cats and dogs.

Would you like to find out which sites link to your home page, or, for that matter, any other page? Type link:[page URL] in the search form. For example, to find sites that link to CNN.com, type link:www.cnn.com.

Google search results also include Adobe Acrobat files, a format often used to store brochures, reports, and similar documents on the ‘Net. Find these files in the results page where [PDF (Portable Document Format)], the extension for Acrobat files, appears in blue letters in front of the title. If you don’t have the Acrobat reader, you’ll be directed to a page where you can download it.

To search only U.S. Government sites, such as sites with the domains .gov and .mil, use Google’s Uncle Sam engine (http://www.google.com/unclesam). To search sites of specific universities, use the University Page (http://www.google.com/options/universities.html).

Google Fact Sheet

Google was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, both of whom were Stanford doctoral candidates in their mid-20s. The search engine technology they developed now performs more than 23 million searches each day on a database that includes more than 1.3 billion Web pages.

Salon.com (http://www.salon.com/) has described this technology as “equal parts rocket science and part peer review.” Google’s Page Rank system is, in effect, a popularity contest, based on the number of other sites linking to a site. As described in Google’s helpful Our Technology section (http://www.google.com/technology), “Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B.”

But Google’s voting system isn’t fully democratic. Google also analyzes the page that casts the vote and rates its importance. So votes from high-quality sites are weighted more heavily in the tally than low-quality sites.

Beyond site popularity, Google also uses complex text-matching techniques, such as how closely your keywords are found together on the document, to insure that the Web pages it retrieves are not only high quality, but relevant to your search.

In June 2000, Google scored a major coup when it replaced Inktomi as Yahoo!’s major search engine provider. In February 2001, Google acquired Deja.com’s popular Usenet Discussion Service. You can search Usenet posts going back to 1995 at http://groups.google.com/.

One big question remains about Google’s future: How is it going to make money? It doesn’t run banner ads, and it doesn’t have a flock of services (as does Yahoo!, for example) that have the potential to generate revenue. Google is building customized intrasite search functions for other clients, and some companies are paying to have Google as an embedded search engine on their sites. Google’s loyal users can only hope that the company finds some way to make a buck while maintaining its outstanding search engine facility.

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