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 Applying google advanced searchGoogle innovations Introduction Google has triumphed through invention. When it was launched in 1998 it rapidly became the hunt tool of pick for professional person researchers due to the higher-up relevance of its consequence coupled with its ease of use and large index of web sites. Since that time its popularity has grown dramatically with over 250 1000000 searches now performed on Google every day worldwide, making it one of the best known trade name in the online world. This consciousness and the potentiality to monetize it through advertising and added value services such as its concern search contraption have led to a value of $15 one million million estimated for Google in its forthcoming IPO (mugwump Public offer). According to Wired (2004) Google ads alone raised $600 million in 2003. Google has not achieved its success by standing still. Though its hunt page looks much the same as it did when it first launched, behind the scenes, it has perpetually refined its hunt algorithm in order to stay one step ahead of its rival in delivering relevant consequence. These alteration to its algorithmic rule present a big challenge to organisations who offer hunt engine optimisation services who have to do what is known as the ‘Google Dance’ every few calendar month when algorithmic rule changes impact the place of their clients’ search listings. Google employment hundreds of ‘hunt engineers’ recruited from the best maths and linguistics graduates about the world. It has also introduced a raft of new hunt tools which are ab initio showcased in its Google Labs subdivision which most Google users do not have the chance to delve into. More Google Advanced hunt features In the last article we introduced some of the core characteristic available through Google’s advanced search page (www.google.com/advanced) such as shaping search key phrases and including and excluding words. All the installation I will describe are available from the Google Advanced search phrase, but ‘power searchers’ will prefer to type the equivalent codes directly into the search box. In the following coverage, I give the specific codes that are used to limit the number of sites returned to help you refine your search results. These specific codes are known as operators – they have a special meaning to Google and instruct it to perform a particular type of search. Advanced search also offers other facilities – some more useful than others. We will look at the most useful ones: * Specify a file format * Specify Occurrence of keywords on web page * Filter results to specific domain(s) (Site:) * Restrict results by date * View links to a page >>Specify a file format Perhaps the most useful of the additional Google Advanced Search features is the facility to specify a file format for results. The options you can select are: * Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) – these are often longer technical or research reports that may not be included near the top of search listing known by search marketers as SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) because of the number of words they contain. Restricting your search just to PDF documents is a very useful, quick method for narrowing down a search which often reveals quality information not necessarily found with a basic search. * Microsoft Word (.doc) – can again find relevant reports or articles that have been posted to the web in this format * Microsoft Powerpoint (.ppt) – often useful for finding research presentations, competitor pitches or summarizing complex topics you are unfamiliar with. Very useful if you have to prepare a presentation on a topic if you are not familiar with the area! >> Specify Occurrence of keywords on web page Very few people seem to use this option, but it can be useful for researching a market or topic you are unfamiliar with. With this advanced search technique you restrict the results to pages which contain key words within the title of the document or the web address. The options include: * In the title of the page. For example, using the advanced search operator intitle:European travel will look for web sites that have these keywords in the title (text enclosed within the * In the URL of the page. For example, using the advanced search operator allinurl: European travel will look for websites where these keywords appear in the URL (uniform resources locator, better known as the web address). The keywords may appear in the domain name or within the filename itself, e.g. Http://www.travelinformation.com/european.html. * In the text of the page. Use this option if you want to restrict your research to the body copy text and do not want your research results to be influenced by what appears in the title or URL. Example: allintext: European travel. * In the links of a page. These are technically known as the anchors. I have not found this to be of value. Tip: Using these methods to improve search relevance is not normally necessary since Google tries to product the best match for your typed keywords anyway from a combination of the occurrence of keywords in copy on the page, in the title tag and within the page’s URL. But, they can be useful for finding ‘portals’ about a topic or for certain types of information such as ‘News’, for example allinurl:travel portal or allinurl:travel news. * and ~ operators If you are not sure of the exact phrase that may be in the title you could the little known Google wildcard operator (*). Unlike most wildcard operators, this does not give multiple endings to a word i.e. Europe* expands to European, Europeans, etc in Altavista. Instead, in Google, ‘*’ fills in the gaps between two words with alternatives, so intitle: European * travel gives sites with titles such as European vacation travel, European budget travel, etc. Another little known operator is the tilde (~). This gives synonyms or alternatives. So European ~travel gives alternative words for travel such as tour, tourism, etc. This feature, I think introduced in 2003 can be also be very useful in standard searches instead of the OR operator. >> Filter results to specific domain(s) (Site:) Domain based filtering using ‘Site:’ is very useful for some types of research where you want to show results from a limited set of sites such as UK registered domains only such as .co.uk, .gov.uk and .ac.uk. I use this feature all the time to narrow-down searches and ‘home-in’ on information. To restrict sites in the SERPS to those from a single country, add the advanced search code ‘site:uk’ to your query. For other sites a similar approach is used. For example, if you are looking for government statistics, but are not sure on which government site to look add the code ‘site:.gov.uk’ to your search query. Tip: 'Site' can also be used to limit your search to domains or specific sites. For example, if you know you want information from the UK government statistics site, but prefer to use Google rather than the specific search engine provided on that that site, you could type, site:www.statistics.gov.uk “transport statistics” and this will only return information from that particular web sites. Finally, such domain filtering can also be useful if you want to display all the pages on a site which contain a particular key phrase. For example, we could search the archives of WNIM for all articles on e-mail marketing using: ‘E-mail Marketing’ site:www.wnim.com. If you want to see all pages on a site – useful for comparing your site to competitors, a similar approach can be used. Typing: +a site:www.wnim.com shows all the pages in the site containing the letter ‘a’ which should occur on every page. The + is necessary, since as explained in the previous article, Google ignores this common letter by default. >> Restrict results by Date The advanced search can be used to specify pages updated in the last 3, 6 or 12 months. Although this appears very useful, unfortunately I don’t find it very useful in practice for the reasons given below. Tip: Unfortunately this technique does not necessarily give up-to-date articles or research since older pages or documents may have been refreshed recently even though the content stays the same. As a result I hardly ever use this approach. >> View links to a page Viewing links into a page is useful from a search marketing viewpoint since marketers naturally want more links in to a page to generate visitors. Of course, you want these referring pages to say nice things about you, so it can also be useful for reputation management. For the researcher it is one way to find related sites. Try It! To find links into the home page of the CIM site, type: link:www.cim.co.uk. There over 1000 links in, but results also include some links from the site. There is no way I know to exclude these since this keyword only works on its own – no other keywords or search codes can be used. Using info:www.cim.co.uk also finds a larger number of pages that include the link. Google extras – ‘Must use’ tools from the Google Labs Google has many tools which can make you more productive. Here we will look at the most useful: * Google Toolbar * Google Glossary * Google News * Google Answer * Google Sets * Tools to assess value of web pages * The Google calculator Many of these tools are within the Google labs, to see the full listing, click http://labs.google.com/glossary >> Google Toolbar The Google toolbar is a ‘must have’ add-in to Microsoft Internet Explorer which enables you to start searching using Google.com any time you have your browser open – without needing to go back to the Google site each time to type in keywords. I am amazed how few business people use this although it’s been around for a couple of years now. One of the reasons is that some corporate IT departments restrict its usage since it needs to be installed as a plug-in. However, if you have a PC at home, it’s a breeze to install. Try it, it will transform your searching life! The Google toolbar has many features such as recording records previous searches, a pop-up blocker and gives ready access to advanced search facilities such as searching an individual site. It also gives you an idea of the Page Rank of your site or how Google rates its relevance to searchers compared to competitor sites. The Google deskbar gives a smaller, but similar search box within the Windows task bar (usually at the bottom of the screen). Tip: This tool will save you a lot of time. If you haven’t already got it, go to http://toolbar.google.com and follow the instructions to download. The simple option is fine. >> Google Glossary The glossary is one of several tools being developed in the Google labs. To access it, click: |