Spring 2006 Shields Library UC Davis
e Th tim Ul at e e id Gu
Presenters: Sheila Cunningham Melissa Browne
What to Expect Today
Some Google History & Background Beyond Keywords: Using Syntax Google Scholar FUN with Google!
Google Begins
A research project:
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, graduate students at Stanford University, began a search engine project in January 1996 Nicknamed it BackRub because their system checked backlinks to estimate a site’s importance
The rest is history
1997
google.com registered as a domain name
2003-2005
1998
Google, Inc. incorporated $1 million raised 10,000 queries run
Gmail GooglePrint (BookSearch) GoogleScholar GoogleMaps GoogleVideo
Today
2001
U.S. Patent 6,285,999 for PageRank® granted
2002
ImageSearch, Froogle, and Google News launched
Over 4,000 employees worldwide Over 8 billion pages indexed Google Earth Google Calendar Google China? 谷歌
What is Google
goo-gol \'gü-"gol\ noun.
The number represented by the numeral 1 followed by a hundred zeros Reflects the company's mission: “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful”
Google Is
A Full Text Search Engine
Keyword search the title and content of web pages for narrower results Can apply special syntax elements to keyword searches to unlock the true magic of Google
A seemingly endless resource for discovery
Google Is Not
A collection of everything online
Internet is too large and growing fast
11 billion+ pages on the surface web & it does not search the deep web
Google does not index all content found on the Internet (music, video, & other non text
based formats)
Not a static system
Always in flux Always evolving
How Google Works
A. Your web server sends the query to Google’s index servers - they tell which pages contain the words that match the query. B. Then the query travels to the doc servers - they retrieve the stored documents. Snippets are generated to describe each search result. C. The search results are returned to the user in a fraction of a second.
1. Crawling & Indexing the Web
Googlebot crawls to web servers around the world to fetch documents
Asks a web server to return a document Scans that document for hyperlinks, which gives it new documents to scan Assigns each retrieved page a number so it can refer to it again
2. Ranking Results
The BIG question: How does Google decide which results go to the top of the list? Best know factor: PageRank™
Assigns importance value (rank) to each page on the web Importance is determined by checking backlinks The higher the value of the backlink pages – the higher the importance of the page
Beyond Keywords: Google’s Special Syntax
Default Searching Standard Search Operators Keyword Search Operators URL Operators Information Operators More Handy Google Tools
Google Scholar
What is Google Scholar? Searching Tips
Basic Searching
Anatomy of a Record
Advanced Searching
References
Google Hacks,2nd Edition Tara Calishain & Rael Dornfest 2004 Google: Top 100 Simplified® Tips & Tricks, Joe Kraynak 2005