Posts Tagged: search

Technology — 4 Comments
28
Mar 08

Google Speed Search Lesson #9 – Features

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 search with your query, and the Big G will give you the answer!

Examples:

Google as a calculator

Using Google to convert measurements
Google can also be used for measurement conversion. This is very handy for converting between imperial and metric, and is so much faster than searching for a dedicated website and using that.

Examples:

Google for currency conversion

If you live in Japan, you’re probably converting yen to dollars or pounds and back again quite regularly. You might even use a website like xe.com, but did you know you could do it all in Google?

Examples:

Using Google as a dictionary

When you’ve lived in Japan a long time, you’ll start to forget how to spell English words, and even forget the meaning of some of them! If you are like me, you’ll absolutely love Google’s define: syntax.

Examples:

Google as a know-it-all smarty pants!

Although Google as a search engine typically points you to websites that can answer your questions, it occasionally likes to show off and just tell you the answers without you needing to visit any websites at all! Try these:

This is all just a little of what you can do with Google, and maybe I’ll come back and cover more search features another time. If you’re keen to learn more, you should take a look at Google Help : Search Features.

Technology — 6 Comments
17
Mar 08

Google Speed Search Lesson #8 – Site:

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 or three steps out of the search process, helping you find what you need more quickly. It’s particularly useful when you remember seeing something on a site, and want to go straight to that article. Here are a few examples of how I use it:

Searching Japan Probe

Japanprobe.com has a lot of posts about the nation’s favorite chimpanzee, Pan-kun. So if you are looking for those, you could either wade through the “Animal videos” category, or use JapanProbe’s own search box… if you can find it. ;)

A quicker way would be to fire up Google and type:

site:japanprobe.com pan-kun

What this does is limit your search to pages from the site, JapanProbe.com, containing the word “pan-kun”. Note that there’s no space after the colon.

Searching Dave’s ESL Cafe

I believe Dave’s ESL Cafe is the biggest ESL site on the net, and its forums are loaded with rants and raves about teaching English. With such a huge site, Google’s special syntax comes in very handy. Let’s say you were looking for discussion about the textbook, New Interchange, this would save you a lot of time:

site:eslcafe.com "New Interchange" textbook

That search will only return pages from eslcafe.com which contain both the phrase “New Interchange” and the word “textbook”.

Searching Tokyo Times

Every blog seems to have a different way of displaying search results. For example, I’ve set up this blog to show 30 summaries per page that match your search term. Tokyo Times on the other hand gives you five full articles. That’s great if you want to read recent posts on the topic you are searching for, but if you’re trying to find something buried in the archives, it could take you a while… unless:

site:tokyotimes.org "Hello Kitty"

This has to be the best way to get to all of the “Hello Kitty” posts on Tokyo Times (if you have that urge). Note: Make sure you know whether the site is a .com, .net, .org. or whatever, otherwise you’ll be searching the wrong site!

Searching What Japan Thinks

What Japan Thinks is the complete resource for Japanese opinion polls in English, and if any site could benefit from a search box it would be this one. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be one on the site itself, which is why Google’s special syntax for searching specific sites is so handy:

site:whatjapanthinks.com iPhone

That should tell you what Japan thinks about Apple’s button-less cell phone.

Exploring sites further

The above examples should give you some ideas about how the site command can help you speed up your searches. For more power at your fingertips, combine it with what you’ve learned in the rest of this series and you’ll be able to track down almost anything!

Next: Lesson #9 – Features

Technology — 3 Comments
6
Feb 08

Google Speed Search Lesson #7 – Special Syntax

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, try searching with the intitle command:

intitle:"michael jackson profile"

This will only return web pages with that term in the title. If you are one of the few people actually looking for Osama Bin Laden, you might find him with this:

intitle:"osama bin laden location"

Searching through the body of a page

If you are looking for blog posts that recommend something better than Windows Vista, you can use the intext command to restrict your search to the body of each page:

intext:"better than Windows Vista"

That will return pages where the author has either suggested a superior alternative to the Windows operating system, or has decided that “there is nothing better than Windows Vista”

Searching through urls only

Sometimes it’s useful to search the urls of web pages to find what you’re looking for. For example, if you want to find the help page on Amazon.com, you might try using the inurl command.

inurl:help Amazon

This brings up all the help pages you could possibly need for the massive online “bookstore”. inurl has its uses, but for webmasters, you can’t beat the site command which I’ll be addressing next time.

Next: Lesson #8 – Site

Technology — 4 Comments
12
Dec 07

Google Speed-Search Lesson #6 – Wildcards

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, but replacing the wildcard with any word. Here are some examples of what this search returns:

  • Mount Fuji is 3776 meters high
  • Mount Fuji is 12377 feet high
  • Mount Fuji is 3.8 km high
  • Mount Fuji is 3066 metres high

That last one proves you shouldn’t believe everything you read on the internet!

Using multiple wildcards

Each instance of the wildcard represents one word (numbers don’t count as shown above). Take a look at these examples with real Google results below each:

"ten * bottles sitting on the wall"

  • Ten green bottles sitting on the wall

"ten * * sitting on the wall"

  • Ten green bloggers sitting on the wall :shock:
  • Ten green bottles sitting on the wall

"ten * * * on the wall"

  • Ten green bottles hanging on the wall
  • Ten green bottles standing on the wall

"ten * * * * the wall"

  • Ten green bottles hanging on the wall
  • Ten years ago, I daresay, The Wall Street Journal…
  • …grew steadily for ten years until we hit the wall

A little creativity can find you what you’re looking for

The Google wildcard is one of my favorite speed-search tricks. You can use it to find song lyrics, such as…

"will * * * me * you * * me * I'm *" (Try this one in Google!)

Or even to find the unanswerable…

"the secret of life is *" ;-)

Next: Lesson #7 – Special Syntax

Technology — No Comments
8
Dec 07

Google Speed-Search Lesson #5 – Case Sensitivity

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 typed APPLE however, you’d get results for the Association to Promote and Protect the Lubec Environment, or the band All Punks Please Leave Earth.

Is a case sensitive search useful?

You could argue that a case sensitive search, such as the “apple” example above, would be useful. You could cut out results for fruit and iPods if you were looking for sites about the Lubec Environment. Unfortunately, you’d be pulling your hair out when you forget to capitalize names and places. Imagine getting different results for “Tokyo” and “tokyo”, or “Albert Einstein” and “albert einstein”.   

Is Google sensitive to case in a search term?

No, fortunately not. Google is case insensitive. You can search for apple, APPLE, Apple, or even aPpLe and get the same results with each word.

Next: Google Speed-Search Lesson #6 – Wildcards

Technology — 2 Comments
29
Nov 07

Google Speed-Search Lesson #3 – Negation

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

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 can be useful when your results are cluttered with unrelated websites. Consider these examples:

Note: There should be a space before the minus sign, but not after.

Ice Age -movie

Despite Ice Age being a popular movie for kids, if you want information on the real ice age, you should remove the word “movie”.

Japanese cars -used

Searching for Japanese cars brings up a bunch of websites selling used cars. If you’re just interested in learning about Japanese cars, remove the word “used” from your results.

football -nfl -american

For English football, or soccer, do a search for results that don’t contain “NFL” or “American”.

"birthday cards" -free -ecard

Wrapping “birthday cards” in double quotes will make sure all the results contain exactly that phrase. Of course, if you’re looking to buy a traditional birthday card, you don’t want results containing “free” or “Ecard”.

Using negation, it’s easy to remove what you don’t want:

US President -"George Bush" ;-)

Next: Google Speed-Search Lesson #4 - Stop Words

Technology — No Comments
26
Nov 07

Google Speed-Search Lesson #2 – Boolean

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 for any website that contains the words Father AND Christmas, not necessarily together, or even in that order. Fortunately, the results you get for this search just happen to have Father and Christmas together in the order you specified, such is the magic of Google’s ranking algorithms. 

Using a phrase search

However, as good as Google is, it gave us over 10 million results, which is just a few more than most people are prepared to look through. Let’s do our search properly, using a phrase search:

"Father Christmas"

That’s better. This time Google gives us 1.5 million results, and we can be sure they all have an exact match for our phrase.

Don’t forget that Google’s Boolean default is AND, so if you search for

"Father Christmas" "Santa Claus"

you’re going to get results that match “Father Christmas” AND “Santa Claus”. Not surprisingly, there are only 318,000 results that match both of these names.

Using Boolean OR

It’s more likely that you want to search for websites that match either “Father Christmas” or “Santa Claus”, in which case you have to explicitly tell Google that by including the Boolean OR in your search:

"Father Christmas" OR "Santa Claus"

Perfect. Now every result contains one or the other jolly little man. Now consider the following search:

"World Cup" (soccer OR football)

If you prefer, you can replace the OR with a pipe character:

"World Cup" (soccer | football)

Remember that this means “Give me results that match the terms “World Cup” and also contain either soccer or football“.

A more complex example with phrase and Boolean searches

Here’s one last example to show you how specific you can be with just phrase and Boolean searches:

Japan "English teacher" "((Nick OR Nicholas) (Ramsay OR Ramsey))"

This means the results must contain one of the following:

  • Japan, English teacher, Nick Ramsay
  • Japan, English teacher, Nick Ramsey
  • Japan, English teacher, Nicholas Ramsay
  • Japan, English teacher, Nicholas Ramsey

Try experimenting with phrase searches and Boolean searches. See if you can find any long, lost friends!

Next: Google Speed-Search Lesson #3 – Negation

Technology — 2 Comments
23
Nov 07

Google Speed-Search Lesson #1 – Phrase Searches

Speed SearchingWhen 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 to that teacher, I have since been able to fire through a dictionary from either end, and find words faster than most other people. 

Speed up your searching with Google

Maybe you have no need for a dictionary these days, but you probably use Google enough to benefit from some speed-searching tricks. Wouldn’t it be great to speed up your Google searches, finding things in half the time? These days, search engines provide special commands that can help you do just that, and I’m going to show you how to use them in small, bite-sized chunks. I’ll start off with the simplest of tricks – the phrase search.

Using phrase searches to speed up your search

Let’s imagine you want to visit Himeji Castle, but don’t know if it’s worth seeing. Let’s Google

Himeji Castle

Okay, that gives you 259,000 results, and most of the results on the first page just give you some background information. What you really need is a review, so you might try…

Himeji Castle reviews

Now you’ve got results for the Himeji Castle Hotel, and links to reviews of the hotel. The reason for this is that Google is returning web pages that contains those words, but not necessarily together, or even in that order. Again, we really want a review of the castle itself, so let’s look for someone who has actually been there, using a phrase search, i.e. we wrap the phrase in double-quotes, like this…

"went to Himeji Castle"

Google now returns 1,290 results for web pages that contain exactly that phrase. Most of the results are useful because the authors have literally said that they went to Himeji Castle, and in most cases go on to tell you what they thought of it. Perfect.

Getting the most out of Google phrase searches

You can search with a combination of phrase searches and keywords, too, for example:

"Canon printer driver" Vista

or

"Nick Ramsay" "English teacher" Japan

If this is all new to you, give it a try. You might be able to find an old friend or fix one of those bugging computer problems!

Next: Google Speed-Search Lesson #2 – Boolean