Google like a pro

Google’s appetite for information is its strength, but for overwhelmed users sifting
through results can present a challenge. Many tools exist to help tap Google’s higher-
level indexing capabilities and make your queries more efficient. Here are a few easy
ones.
JANUARY 2009 • Birgit König

In This Article
• Sidebar: Google mysteries
• About the authors
• Letters to the editor
Searching with Google can be a magical experience—in seconds, you tap vast storehouses of
information on servers in almost every part of the world. In mid-2008, Google announced that
its computers had indexed one trillion Web files, so you’re likely to find things whose existence
you never even suspected.
That’s also the challenge. If you want this amazing resource to find the knowledge you need—
and quickly—you must make your queries efficient by learning some advanced searching
techniques, whether you want a quick overview of a topic, a fact to help you make a point, early
evidence for an out-of-the box hypothesis, or the time when your flight will depart. Many
guides to using the Google search engine are available on the Web; what I hope to contribute
here is a more user-friendly approach to doing Google searches, as well as offering some
suggestions on how to get the best from Google when you are on the road.
What Google can—and can’t—do
While Google’s reach is vast, its computers can find only what is publicly available on the
Internet (for tips about finding information on the “invisible Web,” see sidebar, “Google
mysteries”). That excludes a universe of information its owners don’t want you to see; often,
they don’t even want you to know it exists. What’s more, Google makes no claims about quality
control: it finds all sorts of so-called facts that have been taken out of context or wholly
fabricated. Yet there are tricks that can help you search for information from more reliable
sources.
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Google mysteries
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In general, the best way to find the information you want, without slogging through pages of
irrelevant listings, is to invoke Google’s higher-level indexing capabilities. By fine-tuning your
searches, you can save time and feel reasonably sure that your investigation has been as
thorough as a do-it-yourself researcher can reasonably expect.
Making your queries efficient
The most common mistake is to assume that Google knows what you are looking for when you
enter general search terms. It doesn’t. Google’s computers are amazingly thorough and fast.
But in their most basic mode—looking for a simple one-word search term—they aren’t terribly
bright: they seek any Web page that includes your word with a certain frequency, lies within a
specified proximity to the start of the file, or both. Single search terms work well only for very
specific, narrow topics.
Tip: Use minus signs and quotation marks
Two of the easiest ways to narrow your search are using the minus sign (to avoid a nonrelated
term) or quotation marks (to tell the search engine to look for exactly what appears within the
quotes). These operators are quite useful if your search term has more than one meaning;
Google has no way to intuit which one you’re looking for, as you will find when you read
through the first few wildly irrelevant hits. If you are looking for swimming pools and type in
pool, for example, you’ll find yourself wading through listings about billiards. Fortunately, this
is easy to remedy with the minus sign (−), which eliminates the unwanted listings:

This approach may not narrow your search sufficiently: you’ll still get pool.com, a Web site that
auctions domain names. Here’s where quotation marks help you specify the type of pool you
seek. If you type the word swimming and then the word pool without quotes, Google will list
not only files that have those two terms next to each other but also files that contain both of
them no matter how far apart they may be. Put quotation marks around swimming pool,
however, and it becomes the only search term, and Google will find only pages where that
combination appears. Quotation marks are particularly useful when you are searching for an
exact phrase. If you wanted information about Bloomberg terminals, not Mayor Bloomberg or
the company Bloomberg LLC, for example, you could use quotation marks to search for a
phrase:

* As a result of changes in Web content, you may not get the same results for these examples.
Tip: Search for hidden keywords and titles
Do you still get several thousand hits? At this point, it’s important to understand that Google
indexes all those billions of Web pages by undertaking a full-text search of every file and
retrieving pages where your search term or term combination appears. Google knows only that
the words are there, not whether they represent the actual content of the file; they may appear,
for example, in a passage about a marginal topic or only in a footnote.
To exclude irrelevant hits, you can introduce another filter into your search: the keywords that
the publisher of the page or third parties have added to generate links to it. Keywords give
search engines and other Web sites signals about the actual content of the page. To add this
valuable information to your search, use the allinanchor: syntax, which tells Google to search
for your term among the keywords that appear in what is called anchor text.

To make your search still more precise, you can restrict it to the Web page title: a tag, similar to
a news story’s headline, that a Web publisher creates to provide a precise summary of the
page’s contents. When you type intitle: before your search term, Google looks only at the title
tag. That’s as restrictive as a search can be—you will get only pages whose authors included
your search term in the title, just for Google to find. This approach can be quite useful when
you look for very specific terms, such as the name of a particular product.

Tip: Choose your sources

Another way of improving the quality and efficiency of your results is to specify the kinds of
sources Google should search. You can do so either by conducting your search through the
Google subsites (for example, Google News, Google Blogs, Google Scholar), which you can find
on the Google toolbar, or by adding a special syntax to your query after the search term. Here
are some useful filters:
• site:edu for material from university sites
• site:gov for government sites
• site:us for US sites
• site:org for nonprofits and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)
• inurl:news for news sites
• inurl:blog for blogs
• inurl:forum for forum discussions
For example:

Specifying the type of source you want can not only save you time by winnowing the field of
listings but also give you more confidence in the reliability of the information.
Another filter tells Google what kind of file to find—filetype: followed by the filename
extension for programs such as Word (.doc), Excel (.xls), PowerPoint (.ppt), and Adobe
Acrobat (.pdf). This filter is especially useful if you are looking for raw data, which are most
likely to be found in formats such as Excel spreadsheets.

Tip: Limit your search by time period

Time is another filter that can narrow your search, especially when you need current
information on a topic with a long history, such as Apple’s suit against Microsoft. To restrict
your search to recently updated sites, you can use the syntax inurl:2008, which lists only links
published in 2008. For instance:
Perhaps, however, you are interested in the history of the case, which involved Microsoft’s use
of the graphical user interface popularized by the Mac. Another command—view:timeline—
tells Google to determine how much information about the case has been published over the
years.

Finally, to gain even greater precision, you can combine operators in your commands:

How to find something you can’t specify

If only we knew exactly what we were looking for! Often we don’t, so we turn to Google for a
quick overview of a field rather than a specific bit of information about it. In those situations,
we typically know something, but not enough to specify a good search term. Some of Google’s
advanced operators come in handy here.
When you have a keyword, for example, you can learn more by including its synonyms in the
search. No need to reach for your thesaurus: just type a tilde (~) in front of the keyword, and
Google will run a comprehensive search based on the term and all its synonyms.

Another way of improving your odds in an open-ended search is to use the related: command,
which finds Web sites that contain similar information. Say you’ve been searching for
information at the CNN news site and want to find others with similar material. You could type
related:cnn.com, a command that can also help you gain quick insights into which companies
appear to be competitors, given the similarity of their content.
If you feel adventurous, why not try the wild-card operator—*—essentially, a fill-in-the-blank
command.

This command can save you lots of trouble. If someone drops a mystifying reference into a
conversation and it’s not appropriate to ask for an explanation, jot down the term and type it
into Google later. Say that you hear a business associate talk about admiring Dominion, a
company you don’t know. Type Dominion is a *. You will quickly learn that it may be a
Canadian newspaper, a power company, a theme park, or a freight carrier. One of these is
almost certainly the company your associate admires.
Just the start
Google is much too complex to cover in a few pages, so the examples here represent only a
personal selection of useful commands. To learn more, try the search term Google hacks, and
you’ll find a wonderful selection of sites dedicated to dissecting Google’s search syntax.
Google is the most popular search engine, but hardly the only one. Some general-purpose
competitors, such as Ask.com, display results in a different format and automatically offer
suggestions to narrow or broaden your search. Metasearch engines, like dogpile.com, compile
listings from a number of search engines. Several search sites have some special twist: for
instance, Clusty, founded by Carnegie Mellon computer scientists, offers clusters of related
material. Mahalo.com’s index pages on topics can fine-tune your search.
Vertical search engines specialize in particular industries or topics. These sites—for instance,
paperpundit.com (the paper industry), ides.com (plastics), and pharmweb.net
(pharmaceuticals)—find appropriate results quickly and display listings that would typically be
pages down in Google. When you step beyond Google and try these other tools, you will
typically find that you can use commands similar to those for a Google search.
Tools for the road
Google continues to add handy features. For many common questions, it has shortcuts that
give you answers directly, without your having to click onto a Web site that has the
information. This feature is especially helpful when you work from your BlackBerry.
Let’s assume that you are about to fly from London to Frankfurt for a conference and want to
know whether your flight has been delayed. Just type in the airline and flight number and then
click on Search. In this example, we typed Lufthansa 4743 and obtained the following
information:

Arrival is in local time, of course. To calculate the flight time, you would need to know the time
difference. Google has that, too:

You plan to take a cab to the hotel, which the invitation says is about 35 kilometers from the
airport, but you’ve never understood the metric system. How many miles is that?

German cab drivers rarely take credit cards, so you will have to get euros. What’s the current
conversion rate from the pound?
Having loaded up on euros at Heathrow, you think about the day ahead. You’ll have time to kill
before the conference starts, at noon. Maybe you can find that anniversary gift and take in the
sights of the old town. That all depends on the weather, though. You can check the forecast for
Frankfurt:

Google can also serve as a virtual calculator, which is especially nice if you find the BlackBerry’s
hard-to-maneuver and limited arithmetic functions frustrating. Just type the term and click
Search to get the result:

Useful notations include 2^5 and e^2 for exponents, sin(90) for trigonometry, ln(10) for
logarithms, pi for calculations involving circles, and 5! for factorials. To find a complete list of
math functions, plus links to other handy functions (such as area code lists), go to
google.com/help/features.html.