Tips and Tricks to using Google!

							 Tips and Tricks to using
        Google!


November 2008
Kevin Block, M.S.
Information Management Librarian
UMDNJ-Health Sciences Library
             Why Google?
• Arguably the biggest web search engine
  – Billions of web pages
• Results often include what you want
• Has a large number of features, shortcuts,
  special databases & services
• Google Books and Google Scholar have
  potential for university level research using
  the web
          Limitations to Google
• Doesn’t fully support truncation or wildcards, it
  can do selected word stemming
   – i.e. Virus vs. Viruses
• Lots of stop words
   – i.e. The, “A”, be, and, Roman numerals will be
     ignored in a “basic search”
• Can not search the “hidden web”
   – i.e. Websites that require passwords or authentication
• It’s incredibly big, you can be overwhelmed!
• Quality – With the good you also get the bad!
         How Google Works
• Spider program finds pages on the
  “public” web, builds huge database of
  web pages
• PageRanktm arranges your result
  – Popularity - based on the number of links to a
    page and the importance of the pages that
    link
  – Importance - traffic, quality of links
  – Word proximity and occurrence in results