Google is a primarily a particularly good search engine. They screwed thousands of
people by withdrawing their programmer API (Application Programming Interface)
and now won’t let anyone use it with a program, only a browser.
Limiting Searches
Limiting a Search To A Single Site
Use site:mindprod.com in your search criteria to limit search to one
site.
Limiting a Search To A Single newsgroup
Use group:comp.lang.java.programmer in your search criteria to limit
search to one newsgroup. You must do a Google groups search not a Google web
search.
Finding a similar Page
Use related:mindprod.com/religion/god.html Find pages similar to this
URL (Uniform Resource Locator).
Find a Definition
Use define:zeugma definitions
of a term.
Find a Website
Use inurl:sun find websites with
the word sun in the domain name.
Finding links To a Site
Use link:mindprod.com to
find links to that website from other websites. Find out who is talking about
you. Unfortunately, there is a bug in Google, so you can’t pair
link: with site: to find what a
particular site is saying about you. Last revised/verified:
2009-04-29
Excluding a word
nuts -almonds means documents
containing he word nuts, but not documents also containing the word
almonds. There must be no space after the -
but there must be one before it.
Exact phrase
peanut
butter with the quotes, insists the words appear in that order with
nothing in between.
Relaxed Search
almonds OR
nuts means get documents containing either almonds or
nuts or both. A normal search insists on all the words.
Extension filetype
filetype:pdf gets only Adobe
pdf documents. filetype:html gets only html documents,
(especially useful for Google Desktop that indexes more file types.) -filetype:pdf gets everything but pdf documents.
You can get at other limiters with Google Advanced Search checkboxes, then
look at the HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol)
query generated and learn to compose it directly yourself.
more
search tips
Google International
Google has a national search engine
that focuses on that country:
Webmaster Concerns
In the olden days, when Google redirected someone to your site as the result of a search, they would include
the list of keywords used to find you in the HTTP header. This would help you understand how people were searching for you.
They have stopped doing this. However, now you can get a summary of this information using the Google Webmaster Tools.
Summing Up
Google had two fairly obvious but very good ideas:
- A search engine should rank pages by how many links there are to them. This is
a good measure of the quality of the page. Oddly, Google managed to patent this
obvious idea. This is why they dominated all other search engines.
- It should be possible for someone to display ads just by putting a nugget of
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language)
on his web pages where he wants the ads to occur, then let someone else handle
selling the space, selecting suitable ads for each page, collecting the revenue,
and preparing the ads. By making this duck simple, Google was able to sell ad
space in every niche imaginable. Further, they cleverly select the ads to be of
interest to the readers of the page where they appear so that the ads are usually
useful and interesting rather than annoying. Unfortunately, from the
advertiser’s point of view, it is quite complicated, requiring bidding on
prime space. The advertiser pays per click, rather than per impression or per
sale.
Google is a fairly well behaved company given the huge temptation it has knowing
so much about what everyone is doing. When the founders lose control of the company,
Google will likely become extremely evil. My current complaint with them is they have
a short attention span, probably a side effect of the youth of its employees. They
come up with an interesting concept, develop a proof of concept, turn it loose on the
public, then abandon it. They don’t properly finish, support or polish their
works.
Custom Search API
Google obfuscates its searches by returning spaghetti JavaScript instead of search
results. This makes it difficult to automate searches. You are supposed to use the
Custom Search
API which lets you receive results is JSON (Java Script Object Notation)
or Atom format. The catch is, you may only do 100 searches
per day. If you need more, you must pay for them $5 per
1000 queries.