Effective Googling

Effective Googling! Saikat Sinha 1 2 How Old is Google?   Answer: 9 years (10 on September 7, 2008) In September of 1998, Google Inc. opened its door in Menlo Park, CA. http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/history.html#1995) 3 More About Google  “Google” is a play on the word “googol” which is the mathematical term for 1 followed by 100 zeros and “…reflects the company's mission to organize the immense, seemingly infinite amount of information available on the web.” 4 5 A Unique Company Google founders Larry Page Number of employees: Worldwide, Google employed 10,000 full-time employees as of now Work Environment: Informal: Lava lamps, door on sawhorses as desks, exercise balls for chairs, and dogs roaming the halls… Google: • • • • • The interface is clear and simple. Pages load instantly. Placement in search results is never sold to anyone. Advertising on the site must offer relevant content and not be a distraction. No pop-up ads allowed. Source: http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/tenthings.html Sergey Brin 6 Why do we love Google?     Size and scope: Now indexing over 20 billion web pages (conservative estimate). Relevance of Results: PageRank Diversity of Search: Image, News, Book Search, Scholar, Blog Search, Finance, Froogle, Video . . . and much, much more. Other Tools: Google Maps, Picasa, Blogger, Gmail, Calendar, Docs & Spreadsheets . . . 7 But…  We may love Google, but few users know how to use full search capabilities. 8 Effective Googling  How does Google interpret basic search?   Google places “AND” operator between all search terms entered in basic search box. Automatically searches for some plural/singular and grammatical variants.   You enter: news reader Google searches: news AND reader OR readers Does not search as exact phrase unless quotes present! 9  10 11 Need Exact Phrase? Use quotation marks! “infosys billion dollar” 12 Expand Search With Synonym? Use a “tilde” e.g.: “~infosys” finds IT companies similar to Infosys 13 Search by filetype (pdf, ppt, xls, doc) e.g.: “.Net Framework” filetype:ppt 14 Negative Search Terms e.g.: “nano –car” will return the results with word „nano‟ but not Tata Nano car 15 Limit your search results to a particular web site e.g.: “sparsh site:infosys.com” will get the pages from infosys.com where the word „sparsh‟ is referred ` 16 Search for sites that link to a particular website: e.g.: “link:infosys.com” 17 You’ve found a useful website & want to find other sites like it: e.g.: “related:www.infosys.com” 18 Google is a Dictionary Find definition of a word or a phrase? e.g.: define: scruples 19 Google is a Calculator as well  20 Google is Converter too..! Convert currency, units and a lot more 21 More Search Operators 22 Use Specialty Search Functions       Google News: news.google.com Google Images: images.google.com Google Blog Search: blogsearch.google.com Google Finance: finance.google.com Google Scholar: scholar.google.com Google Book Search: books.google.com 23 Google News Alerts    Tracking an event in the news? Create your own Google News alert – it‟s free! Can choose to monitor latest developments on web pages, blogs, Google news, Google discussion group pages, or all of these sources. 24 25 Google Scholar    Covers: law, medicine, social sciences, arts, humanities, business, & finance. Included items: peer-reviewed papers, theses, book excerpts, abstracts & full-text articles Sources for items: academic publisher web pages, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities, & other scholarly organizations. 26 27 Google Book Search     Searches full text of indexed books. If work is in public domain, full contents usually available. If not, users can view bibliographic info (author, title, publisher) and perhaps some excerpts. Library partners: UC, Princeton, Stanford, Univ. of Michigan, Univ. of Texas, Oxford, UVA, Univ. of Wisconsin, …… 28 29 30 31 Something exciting at last 32 local.google.co.in Effective localized search solution 33 google.co.in/movies Find theatres running your desired movies in your city..wow 34 google.com/ codesearch search public source code 35 Google hack for finding movies/music (warning: Not to be tried at office but home…!) e.g.: intitle:”index.of”(mp3|mp4|avi|dat|mpeg) mummy Interesting stuff         Google Docs Google Calendar Google Reader Google Gear Google App Engine Google Sites Google Sets Google Trends and so on… 38 PageRank   PageRank explained by Google: Google interprets a link on page A going to page B as a vote -- by page A, for page B. Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily. 39