Improve Google searches

Google can do much more than basic web searches – find out how with our complete guide to this search engine’s hidden features

Mark Wilson, Computeract!ve 09 Jul 2008

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The internet is a vast resource containing information about every topic imaginable. The problem with this immense free library is that it can be a little overwhelming – just how do you track down the sites about particular subjects?

This is where a search engine can help and in this feature we’re going to take a look at how to get the most out of Google – the most popular search engine in existence. Note that text in bold denotes search terms as they should be typed into Google’s search bar.

Anybody can perform a simple web search using Google (www.google.co.uk) or any alternative search tool, such as Microsoft’s Live Search (www.live.com), Yahoo (www.search.yahoo.com) and Ask (www.ask.com). But with so many sites being published, most searches will produce hundreds of results.

By fine-tuning your search technique, it is possible to find what you are looking for without having to sift through hundreds of unrelated sites. We’ll explain how in this article. Note that text in bold shows the exact text and symbols to type in.

A search engine can be seen as an ever-growing index page for the internet. All the major search engines regularly scour the internet, scanning for new and updated pages and creating listings. When we type a search word or phrase into Google, it is checked against this listing for sites that match using key words.
It is possible to enter a number of search terms into the search box and this will influence the list of sites which are displayed in the results.

For example, searching for Australia will display a list of sites about the country Australia, while searching for Australia holiday will return a list of sites about travel destinations and hotels in Australia. The addition of this one extra word reduces the list of search results from 583 million pages to 44.5 million.

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This is still a huge list to work through, so it makes sense to be as specific as possible with the search terms. Searching for Australia camping holiday further reduces the number of sites to 2.39 million pages, which is still unmanageable. A quick look at some of the resulting websites shows that this basic search found all the sites that contain any of the three words.

As we’re keen on tracking down sites with information about a camping holiday, it makes sense to tell Google to search for this specific phrase. This can be achieved by enclosing the specific part of your search term (in our example, the words ‘camping holiday’) in double quotation marks: Australia “camping holiday”. That simple tip reduces our results to a slightly less intimidating 57,600 pages.

When searching for a page relating to any topic, it makes sense to include as many search terms as possible. This helps to ensure that the results which are displayed are relevant and reduces the number of sites found. By default, Google will search the internet in its entirety, including pages that have been written in different languages. It will also search for all available content and depending on what is being searched for, may result in pornographic websites being found.

It is possible to customise how Google works so that only suitable sites are displayed and these settings can be saved for use on every search. Click the Preferences link to the right of the main search box; in the Search Language section, you can specify your preference for sites written in a certain language by ticking the boxes next to them.

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