A search engine basically indexes web pages by keywords that appear in a given page. The user enters a keyword
into the Google text box and presses return or a search button, and the keyword is transmitted to a Google
server and used by Google’s software to retrieve a list of web pages containing that keyword. Thousands, even
millions of pages may answer to the keyword. For instance, using the keyword, ‘education’, Google returns
eighty-eight million pages indexed under education. If you’re just wondering what sort of pages would answer to
that keyword, your work is done, but more than likely, you have a more specific interest in education, such as
adult education, childhood education, education in China or the like. In such a case, you would enter
additional, modifying keywords for your search. Entering a list of keywords, such as [“continuing education”]
is a basic query. In this document, the brackets, “[“ and “]” indicates a query, but the query does not include
the brackets when you enter the query into the text box of a Google search.
Most users do not use advanced Google search provision, unless they’ve studied Google’s Search Basics. These
advanced Google search techniques allow you greater specificity in your search query. The first of these
advanced Google search techniques is the use of quotes as a search query. A phrase will contain two or more
words between quotes. For example, if you want pages with the phrase [“continuing education”], Google will
return a list of pages in which the two words are found in the order given. Google appropriately warns you, if
you use phrases, only pages with the words given in that exact order will be returned. Thus, you would not
receive pages that only have “continuing adult education” in its text.
An alternative to the use of quotes is the use of the plus sign, +, immediately before the second and
subsequent words. Thus, instead of [“continuing education”], you could enter [continuing +education]. The plus
sign must not be followed by a space, only the next word.
Another advanced Google search provision is the “site:” parameter. This parameter instructs the Google search
engine to look for the keywords you first enter in the site you specify. Toronto Wedding Photography is a step-by-step science and my “No-Fail” system will work for you it doesn’t matter what your situation is. For instance, you may want to
search the University of California San Diego for continuing education. The university’s URL is www.ucsd.edu.
Your query would appear as follows: [“continuing education” site:ucsd.edu].
One advanced Google search technique is extremely useful when you are getting pages that answer to your search
query, but are not exactly what you’re looking for. Let’s say your search query is [continuing education].
Google may return several listings for online continuing education. Rather than filter through the listings to
find one that is not online, you can instruct Google to return listings that specifically do not have the word,
“online”, by preceding the word by a minus sign, “-”. Your query would look like this: [continuing education
-online]. You may exclude more than one keyword, preceding each by a minus sign. Remember, do not include a
blank after the minus sign. The word or phrase you want to exclude must immediately follow the minus sign. Yes,
you can also exclude phrases.
The advanced Google search also allows submitting a query that uses the logical terms, “AND” and “OR”. When you
use these terms, they must be in capitals. You cannot use parentheses to group a member of the query, a serious
shortcoming. So, if you wanted to find pages that answer to the phrase, “continuing education” or to the
phrase, “continuing adult education”, you can simply join the two phrases with an “OR”: [“continuing education”
OR “continuing adult education”].
What if you want Google to return a list of various kinds of continuing education? You could use the OR between
each phrase as you did above, but you’d have to know what kinds of continuing education are available, such as
continuing legal education or continuing medical education. Rather than create a phrase for each type of
continuing education, the advanced Google search allows you to use an asterisk between the words “continuing”
and “education” to hold the place of any word that might appear between these two words. To retrieve a list of
all types of continuing education, you’d use the following query: [continuing * education]. This asterisk, also
called a wild card character, tells the search engine to fill in the asterisk with any word that is found
between those two words. Google would return a list of pages with phrases such as “continuing professional
education, “continuing medical education”, “continuing legal education”, and so on. Note, the asterisk may be
used with single words as well. For instance, if you want a list of pages with any kind of recipe, you’d type:
[* recipes]. Google would return a list of pages with phrases such as “healthy recipes”, “vegetarian recipes”,
“easy recipes”. Use of the wild card gives you a broad search which you can use to narrow subsequent queries.
In addition to using these advanced Google search techniques, the Google home page provides a link to its
advanced search form. The form has three sections and links to more options. The first section is entitled
“Find web pages that have…”. The options are all text boxes. The first box is labeled, “all these words”. You
enter each word that you want as a required keyword, separating each word by a space. This is the same as
querying: [continuing education]. The second box is labeled “this exact wording or phrase”. You enter the
keywords in the exact order they should occur in the document. This is the same as using the quotes. Of course,
in this box, you do not enter quotes. The third labels reads, “one or more of these words”, and is followed by
three text boxes separated by “OR”. You enter a keyword in each box. Again, this is the same as using the “OR”
in a straight query as discussed above.
The second section of the advanced Google search form is entitled, ‘But don’t show pages that have…”. A text
box follows wherein you enter each keyword you don’t want included in the search. You may enter more than one
word, each separated by a space. As you might have guessed, this performs the same function as using the minus
operator discussed above.
The third section of the advanced Google search form is entitled “Need more tools?”. The first label reads,
“Results per page:”, followed by a drop-down list box that allows you to select the number of entries you want
to appear on each page. Your choices are 10, 20, 30, 50, or 100 results per page. Select the one you want. This
section also allows you to narrow your search by language, starting with any language and then a list of
languages from which you select the language desired. This section also allows you to narrow your search to
pages that match a specific file type, such as “pdf” or “doc”. The final option in this section allows you to
specify which site you want to search, performing the same function as the “site:” parameter as discussed
above.
The fourth section of the advanced Google search form is entitled “Date, usage rights, numeric range, and
more”. Date allows you to choose how recent the page should be: the past 24 hours, week, month or year. You may
also limit the pages returned by usage rights. The options are “not filtered by license”, “free to use or
share”, “free to use or share even commercially”, “free to use, share, or modify”, and “free to use, share, or
modify, even commercially”. You can even specify where you want your keywords to show up on the pages returned.
The options are “anywhere in the page”,“in the title of the page”, “in the text of the page”, “in the URL of
the page”, or “in links in the page”. You may also specify a region the page may come from, which includes “any
region”, or any country presented in a drop-down list. You may also limit the pages returned by a numeric
range. For instance, if your search was for [“cheap cars”], you would enter a price range, such as $100 …
$1000.
Finally, the advanced Google search page allows you to select the SafeSearch feature of Google. A safe search
will not return adult sites.
Now, you’re equipped to search Google with greater precision using the advanced Google search techniques or the
advanced search form. I took my first Wedding Photography Toronto about 3weks ago. Perhaps in the future, Google may add precedence operators and parentheses, to
provide a fully boolean vocabulary and expression, as is now used in most SQL databases. Perhaps, Google’s
competitors will come up with one of their own. Only the future will tell.