Google For Dummies

Basic Web Searches

Searching the Web is when you draw close to the life-form called Google. Entering a keyword is like venturing near the multilimbed Goddess of Knowledge and basking in the blazing glory of her wisdom. Or something. It’s just a Web search, but with results so astute that you can’t help wondering whether a person — a person who knows you very, very well — is lurking inside the machine.

The Google home page is a reactionary expression against the 1990s trend that turned search engines into busy, all-purpose information portals. (See Figures 2-4 and 2-5.) Yahoo!, Lycos, Excite, and others engaged in portal wars in which victory seemed to depend on which site could clutter the page with the most horoscopes, weather forecasts, news headlines, and stock market bulletins. This loud and lavish competition resulted from the failure of plain search engines to earn the traffic and money necessary to keep their businesses afloat. They piled more features into their pages and, in some cases, ruined their integrity by selling preferred placement in search results. During this mad gold rush, some specialty engines retained their primary focus on Web searching, and a few, such as HotBot, to this day keep their home pages clean of any distractions.

Figure 2-4: Yikes! The 1990s-style search portal is like an urban jungle. And you’re not seeing the pop-up ads.

Figure 2-5: By contrast, Google is a clean mountain stream with just one purpose: to quench your thirst for search results.

Google has embraced the purity of searching with an ad-free, horoscope-absent home page that leaves no doubt that searching is the task at hand. And its search results are so good that it has singly reshaped the search industry. Lycos, Excite, Netscape, and others barely register on anybody’s radar as search engines, attractive though they might be as broad Internet portals. Some (Yahoo! and Netscape, for example) use the Google engine to deliver Web-search results. These days, for most people, to search is to use Google.

So let’s get to it. A six-year-old would find the Google home page easy to use. When you log onto Google’s home page, the mouse cursor is already waiting for you in the keyword search box. Type a word — any word. Or more than one. Or type a sentence in plain English. Press Enter or click the Google Search button. The results are on your screen within seconds.

How insensitive!

Rules dictating when to use uppercase or lowercase letters have taken a beating in the Internet’s linguistic culture. The prevailing dialect of chat rooms, message boards, and e-mail discards the uppercase start to sentences as if it were an outgrown fad. Fortunately, nobody has to spruce up their typing habits for Google’s sake because the search engine is oblivious to case issues — the technical term is case-insensitive.

Choosing the right keywords

Google is possibly the most forgiving search engine ever created. You can type just about any darn thing into it and get good results. Sometimes you can even get away with sloppy spelling — Google often catches it and suggests the correct spelling. Much of the crafty keywording I wrote about in Internet Searching for Dummies goes out the window in Google, which turns vague hints and plain-English queries into gold. Still, some tips apply.

The golden rule in Internet searching is that more keywords deliver fewer results. So pile them on to narrow your search. With that technique, however, you run the risk of having conflicting or obfuscating keywords, creating a mixed bag of search results. Ideally, you want to concisely convey to Google what you need. I’ve found that two is the golden number of keywords to use in Google searches. At my Web sites, the tracking software tells me which search queries get to my pages, and invariably the two-word strings reach my best stuff.

On the other end of the pith spectrum, many people get good results by typing entire sentences in the keyword box. Google always eliminates certain little words such as what and why, which might seem to devalue questions but doesn’t in practice.

Beware of words that have more than one meaning, especially if you search for one keyword at a time.

For power searching, in which the goal is not more results but fewer, better results, use the Advanced Search pages or the search operators, both described later in this chapter.

The tabs atop the keyword box — Web, Images, Groups, Directory, News — take you to the home pages of those sections when clicked. If you’re on a search results page and click a tab, however, you get results for that tab (Web, Images, Groups, Directory, or News) instantly. So, the tabs shuttle between home pages when you don’t have search results yet. The tabs shuttle between search results pages when you have one set of results in any area.

On to the search results page. That’s where the action is.