Monday, February 9, 2015

Google Search Tips



  • Napoleon book search:  filtering images by color (2:00)
  • Search technology and process:  spiders copy pages and content (4:00)
  • AND is implied in Google:  Birch's theorem (7:30)
  • Google considers every word, so every word matters:  Who vs. The Who vs. A Who (7:45)  So, small words can clutter up your results
  • Order matters:  grass snake (10:30)
  • Chart:  What matters in a search query (12:00)  
  • Capitalization doesn't matter, except OR
  • Punctuation doesn't matter, except $ and # and + (in C++ or Google+)
  • Synonyms:  Death Tax = Estate Tax (15:00)
  • Avoid typing in questions, since it yields answer sites (16:45)
  • Ads only appear when your search seems like something that may have you shop (18:03)
  • Ellipses in the snippet are very different from in academic usage, where they indicate that something long but unnecessary has been left out (21:40)
  • Predictive searches, think about what your results should contain before you search:  UbD and "essential questions" (28:45), professional basketball (31:30)
  • Using quotation marks to search for specific phrases, like a line in a poem (33:00) or something like <pig "latin name"> (34:15)
  • Using NOT in all caps is different here than in fee databases (35:45).  In Google, use the minus sign (no spaces) to eliminate terms from your search
  • OR = the one time in Google that you need capital letters (40:00)
  • Using search results to help hone your search terms:  immigrants sending money home = remittances (42:20)
  • Filtering search results by custom date ranges, UK referendum (48:00)
The next video on power/advanced searching is pretty useless and outdated.  It basically covers material that is better presented here:
 -- Google's index of advanced operators, also abbreviated here under Advanced Search
 -- More on operators in infographic form

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