Google For Dummies Free Open Book

Google For Dummies

Previous Section
 < Day Day Up > 
Next Section

Finding the Freshest Google

Google is not particularly strong at letting you determine the freshness of search results. The vagueness surrounding page freshness is due to several reasons:

  • Google uses more than spiders to crawl the Web, and more than one type of spider. (See Chapter 12 for more about spiders and Web crawling.) These crawlers operate at different speeds and different depths. It’s possible for a newly created Web page to go undetected by one crawl and then turn up in the index two weeks later after a deeper crawl.

  • Google uses more than one server (Internet computer) to deliver search results. The servers are not perfectly synchronized. At any moment, one server might give slightly different search results than another server. This fact, plus the multiple spiders, results in what observers call the Google dance. Later in this chapter I point you to a few sites that allow you to track the Google dance.

  • The freshness of a page is determined by the time it was created, or the time it was added to Google’s index, or both.

Google does enable a certain degree of freshness filtering on the Advanced Search page in Web search. (An advanced search in Google Groups lets you specify dates exactly because newsgroup posts are dated more precisely than Web pages. See Chapter 4.) On the Advanced Search page, you can ask for Web pages updated within the past three months, six months, or year. These large time frames are safe for Google, because the three variables just listed cause confusion only within time periods shorter than three months.

An alternate Google engine called GooFresh invites you to fine-tune the freshness setting by drastically narrowing the time frame. GooFresh is located here:

www.researchbuzz.com/toolbox/goofresh.shtml

GooFresh accomplishes the time-narrowing trick by using the daterange operator. I don’t discuss this operator much in this book because daterange doesn’t understand dates formatted in a typical fashion — month, day, and year. Google understands only the Julian date system, which involves long and cryptic strings of numbers. Online Julian date converters are available for use with the daterange operator. If you do so, you are still subject to the Google dance depending on when a page is added to the index and when it hits all the servers.

Assuming that your freshness needs aren’t too precise or imperative, GooFresh is a fine alternative. Figure 14-2 shows the GooFresh page ready to launch a search. The search results look completely normal and are drastically narrowed compared to an undated search. A recent search for the keyword internet, which normally returns hundreds of thousands of results, yielded only three when GooFresh looked for pages added on the current day.

Click To expand
Figure 14-2: The GooFresh interface to Google, where you can find Web sites freshly added to the Google index.
Tip 

Widen your search results by enlarging the time frame. Selecting Today from the drop-down menu (see Figure 14-2) delivers the fewest results. Also, because of the restricted time frame, you get better (or, at least, more) results by using fewer keywords. At the same time, limit your use of operators, especially when choosing Today or Yesterday. In other words, give Google some breathing space: Be less demanding in your keywords when you’re more demanding about the time frame.

Remember 

GooFresh provides results based on when pages were added to the Google index, not when the pages were created. Here’s something else to remember: GooFresh (that is to say, the Google engine lurking behind GooFresh) does not understand some of the special search operators described in Chapter 2, such as the link operator. Some operators are shut out because they don’t work in combination with the daterange operator that GooFresh employs behind the scenes of your search.


Previous Section
 < Day Day Up > 
Next Section
Index: [SYMBOL][A][B][C][D][E][F][G][H][I][J][K][L][M][N][O][P][Q][R][S][T][U][V][W][X][Y][Z]


     Main Menu
Table of Contents
BackCover
Google For Dummies
Introduction
Part I: Taming Google
Part II: Specialty Searching
Part III: Putting Google to Work for You
Part IV: Tricks, Games, and Alternatives to Google
Chapter 13: Hosting a Weblog with Google's Blogger
Chapter 14: Alternatives to Google
Bare-Bones Results
Finding the Freshest Google
The Amazing TouchGraph
Google by E-Mail
Dancing the Google Dance
Very Advanced Searching: The Google Ultimate Interface
GAPS, GARBO, and GAWSH
Chatting with Google
Flash with Floogle
Two Final, Frivolous Alternatives to Google
Chapter 15: Twisted Googling and Google Games
Part V: The Part of Tens
Google For Dummies Cheat Sheet
Index
List of Figures
List of Sidebars


More Books
PHP Hacks
Processing Xml With Java - A Guide To Sax, Dom, Jdom, Jaxp, And Trax
The Koran (Holy Qur'an)
Macromedia Flash 8 Bible
Search Engine Optimization for Dummies
YouTube Traffic
PHP 5 for Dummies
Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
The Pilgrim's Progress
Wireless Hacks
Flash Hacks. 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools
PayPal Hacks. 100 Industrial-Strength Tips and Tools
Amazon Hacks
Pdf Hacks
The Da Vinci Code
Google Hacks
The Holy Bible
Windows XP For Dummies
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Seo Book
Upgrading and Repairing Networks
Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 UNLEASHED
Windows XP Annoyances
Windows XP Hacks
Microsoft Windows XP Power Toolkit
Teach Yourself MS Office In 24Hours
iPod & iTunes Missing Manual
PC Hacks 100 Industrial-Strength Tips and Tools
PC Overclocking, Optimization, and Tuning - 2th Edition
PC Hardware In A Nutshell 3rd Edition
PC Hardware in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition
Upgrading and Repairing PCs
Google for Dummies
MySQL Cookbook
Teach Yourself Macromedia Flash 8 In 24 Hours
PHP CookBook
Sams Teach Yourself JavaScript in 24 Hours
PHP5 Manual
Free Games Paper Airplanes
500 Juegos Gratis 500 Giochi Gratis 500 Jeux Gratuits 500 Jogos Gratis 500 Kostenlose Spiele