1.3 What Google Is
The way most people use an Internet search engine is to drop in a
couple of keywords and see what turns up. While in certain domains
that can yield some decent results, it's becoming
less and less effective as the Internet gets larger and larger.
Google provides some special
syntaxes
to help guide its engine in understanding what
you're looking for. This section of the book takes a
detailed look at Google's syntax and how best to use
it. Briefly:
- Within the page
-
Google supports syntaxes that allow you to restrict your search to
certain components of a page, such as the title or the URL.
- Kinds of pages
-
Google allows you to restrict your search to certain kinds of pages,
such as sites from the educational (EDU) domain or pages that were
indexed within a particular period of time.
- Kinds of content
-
With Google, you can find a variety of file types; for example,
Microsoft Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PDF files. You can
even find specialty web pages the likes of XML, SHTML, or RSS.
- Special collections
-
Google has several different search properties, but some of them
aren't as removed from the web index as you might
think. You may be aware of Google's index of news
stories and images, but did you know about Google's
university searches? Or how about the special searches that allow you
to restrict your searches by topic, to BSD, Linux, Apple, Microsoft,
or the U.S. government?
These special syntaxes are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary,
it's in the combination that the true magic of
Google lies. Search for certain kinds of pages in special collections
or different page elements on different types of pages.
If you get one thing out of this book, get this: the possibilities
are (almost) endless. This book can teach you techniques, but if you
just learn them by rote and then never apply them, they
won't do you any good.
Experiment. Play. Keep your search requirements in mind and try to
bend the resources provided in this book to your needs—build a
toolbox of search techniques that works specifically for you.
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