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Google Speed Search Lesson #9 - Features

March 28th, 2008 by Nick Ramsay

This is part nine of my Google Speed-Search series. In the last lesson, I gave examples of using Google’s site: syntax. In this lesson, we’re going to have some fun with some really useful search features.
Google as a calculator
Did you know you can use Google as a calculator? Using either math or plain English, just [...]

Posted in Technology | 4 Comments »

Nick Ramsay Google Battle Update

March 24th, 2008 by Nick Ramsay

In October last year, I laid down the gauntlet and swore I would take the number one spot in Google’s search results for my own name. My opponent was none other than the politician, Nick Ramsay, who happens to be a fellow Brit, born in the same year as myself! Supported by internet powerhouses Wikipedia [...]

Posted in Technology | 19 Comments »

Google Speed Search Lesson #8 - Site:

March 17th, 2008 by Nick Ramsay

This is part eight of my Google Speed-Search series. In the last lesson, I showed you some of Google’s special syntax. This time, I’ll continue that theme with the site: syntax element.
Searching a web site

If you know which site you want to search, Google’s site command is a wonderful time saver that often cuts two [...]

Posted in Technology | 6 Comments »

Google Speed Search Lesson #7 - Special Syntax

February 6th, 2008 by Nick Ramsay

Here’s part seven of my Google Speed-Search series. This post looks at how you can use special syntax to finds results based on title, body text or url.
Searching only page titles
Let’s say you wanted to find profile pages for Michael Jackson. The most relevant will have “Michael Jackson profile” in the title, right? So, [...]

Posted in Technology | 3 Comments »

Using JapanSoc to Boost Blog Traffic

January 7th, 2008 by Nick Ramsay

submit_url = ‘http://www.longcountdown.com/2008/01/07/using-japansoc-to-boost-blog-traffic/’;From time to time, I’ll be posting about my new project, JapanSoc, so if you’re not sure what it is, please read the article JapanSoc Brings Social Bookmarking to Japan so that you understand these posts!
Over on the Daily J, Chris B posted a comment about JapanSoc’s voting system, suggesting that people could [...]

Posted in JapanSoc | 12 Comments »

Google Speed-Search Lesson #6 - Wildcards

December 12th, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

Here’s part six of my Google Speed-Search series. In this lesson, we’ll use wildcards to speed up our searches.
A wildcard in Google is represented by an asterisk (*) and used instead of a single word. Consider this search:
“Mount Fuji is * high”
This phrase search forces Google to return web pages with the exact phrase above, [...]

Posted in Technology | 4 Comments »

Google Speed-Search Lesson #5 - Case Sensitivity

December 8th, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

Here’s part five of my Google Speed-Search series. This post answers the question, is a Google search case sensitive?
What difference does case make?
Some search engines will return different results depending on whether you use upper or lower case characters. So, for example, if you type apple you’d get results for the fruit or technology giant. If you [...]

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

Ramsay Ramblings 12/6/2007

December 6th, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

There are a few things I’d like to ramble about this morning (2:30am!).
The word “Half” - to allow it or not
Mami and I were talking about what to tell Rikuto about the word, “half”. If you missed my post, Half-Japanese or Half-Blood?, this English word is used by Japanese people to describe someone who is only part Japanese. Foreigners [...]

Posted in Miscellaneous | 12 Comments »

Google Speed-Search Lesson #4 - Stop Words

December 1st, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

In this fourth part of my Google Speed-Search series, we’ll take a look at stop words - words that Google ignores.
What words does Google ignore?
There doesn’t seem to be a public list of Google stop words available (although I did find this), but words like the, is, are, that, on, in and with are very likely to be [...]

Posted in Technology | 3 Comments »

Google Speed-Search Lesson #3 - Negation

November 29th, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

This is the third part in my Google Speed-Search series. Here are the first two parts if you missed them:

Google Speed-Search Lesson #1 - Phrase Searches
Google Speed-Search Lesson #2 - Boolean

Remove unwanted results with negation
This lesson introduces negation, i.e. using a minus sign (-) to specify terms you don’t want to appear in your search results. This [...]

Posted in Technology | 2 Comments »

Google Speed-Search Lesson #2 - Boolean

November 26th, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

In Google Speed-Search Lesson #1, I showed you how to do phrase searches. In this lesson, we’ll look at basic Boolean, i.e. using uppercase AND and OR in our searches.
Let’s imagine you’re British and you want to find websites about Father Christmas, you might start with this:
Father Christmas
What you’re really telling Google is to search [...]

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

Google Speed-Search Lesson #1 - Phrase Searches

November 23rd, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

When I was in Secondary school, my math teacher gave us a peculiar exercise for homework. She wanted us to memorize the alphabet backwards before the next lesson. Not surprisingly, when that lesson came, there were only two of us in the class who had actually made the effort to remember our ABCs in reverse order. Thanks [...]