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Better Googling

May 23, 2011, 8:00 am

By George Williams

One of the greatest strengths of the world’s most widely used Internet search engine is also one of its greatest weaknesses: comprehensiveness. For example, a search using the keyword poverty results in almost 90,000,000 results, which is far too many for any individual person to sort through. Granted, Google ranks the links that it returns according to a proprietary algorithm so that the most relevant results are listed first. But instead of relying on that algorithm, why not learn specific strategies to narrow down your search results in order to get the results most relevant to what you specifically need?

If you live in South Carolina, say, and you’re only interested in information about poverty made available by state government agencies, you can construct a search as search constructed as poverty site:*.sc.gov and you’ll only get 299 results, which is much more manageable.

The trick is to add site:*.sc.gov to the query where site: specifies which Web site (or sites) you want to search. In this case, I also used the wild card * before sc.gov so that any site run by the state government will be included. This is just one example among many of the strategies you can use for better Googling.

So how does one learn more about these strategies? Fortunately, Google provides explanations of many different features you can take advantage of:

And for the classroom, it’s a good idea to check out “Google Web Search – Classroom Lessons and Resources.” According to Google, “[th]e lessons are short, modular and not specific to any discipline so you can mix and match to what best fits the needs of your classroom. Additionally, all lessons come with a companion set of slides (and some with additional resources) to help you guide your in-class discussions.”

How about you? What are your favorite strategies for “better Googling”? Let’s hear from you in the comments!

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  • http://twitter.com/MarkRosch Mark Rosch MCLE

    This is a very useful tip (and one we’ve been sharing with Web searchers for a number of years). My new favorite is the AROUND proximity connector that allows you to dictate precisely how close together you want your keyword to be. for example, Mark AROUND(3) Rosch would return results where Mark was within three words (in either direction) of Rosch.

    This functionality is not documented in Google’s help pages and came to our attention via a tweet from a Google search engineer. We’ve done some testing and detail more of its uses, features, and quirks in this post http://linkon.in/hBWq4G.

  • rfisher2861

    This is very simple and also has to do with proximity: use quotes around phrases. For instance: “academic freedom” searches for that particular phrase, not the words “academic” and “freedom” anywhere they might appear.

  • mbelvadi

    You don’t need the wildcard, just site:sc.gov will match [anything].sc.gov.

    I also like the ability to use OR (or the pipe character |) especially in combination with phrases that Google might not already consider to be synonymous.  Sample search:
    canada   “residential schools” | “boarding schools”    indians | aboriginals | “first nation”

  • mbelvadi

    This is specific to Google Scholar, but if your institution has registered with Google, make sure you’ve added your library to your Scholar Preferences so that links to your full text journals through your licensed collections appear when using Google Scholar.  If you aren’t sure and can’t find your institution in the lookup box in Scholar Preferences, ask your librarians about it.  This enables you to get a “custom” link to your own library’s journal holdings (including the online holdings) when you’re looking at Google Scholar results.

  • mbelvadi

     Most people don’t realize that asterisk in Google, unlike library databases, substitutes for an entire word.  For example (and do use the quotation marks): “mother is the * of”  will find you uses of this phrase with any word in place of the asterisk (“mother is the veil of…”, “mother is the embodiment of”, etc.).  You can do multiple ones too, with spaces around each as word placeholders, so “mother is the * * of” will match either one or two words between “the” and “of”.  This can be helpful for hand-checking for plagiarism when you have an obviously suspicious sentence and a good idea which word was swapped in.

  • iredale

    There are some great tips here, but I’m surprised that Google has not implemented a more robust system of boolean searching. This has been the norm on legal databases like Lexis/Nexis and Westlaw for decades, and it’s incredibly useful if you know how to use it well.  Does anyone know why Google hasn’t implemented something like that? Is it simply because such searches would take substantially more processing time?

  • sunyogc

    I’ve never used the * for a wildcard but still receive results from all different sites ending with whatever I put after “site:”.

  • dpn33

    One of my favorite functions is the “define” function. Type define followed by a word or phrase. If you click on “more” after the first entry, you’ll get a nice page with definitions from multiple web dictionaries, examples of usage, and sometimes related terms. I also use the built in calculator a lot (more info on their “features” page at http://www.google.com/intl/en/help/features.html). Many other cool features are described on that page.

  • hagerstown

    I have students go to the advanced search box and use the format and domain boxes. In the format box, I tell them to pick PDF for much better results. You get actual authors and papers. They also have  other formats which are useful, such as powerpoint. In the domain box, they can put either edu, gov, or org to narrow the results to authoritative sources. 

  • pacifica888

    And then there blekko ( http://blekko.com/ ), where you can take advantage of slashtags that others have already created on specific topics …

  • sgray17

    This can be done by accessing the advanced search interface so that you don’t need to remember the codes or tricks:  http://www.google.com/advanced_search

  • http://ProfHacker.com George H. Williams

    Nice! Thanks for sharing that, Mark.

  • http://ProfHacker.com George H. Williams

    Yes, that’s a good one, and (in my experience, at least) many people don’t know about it.

  • http://ProfHacker.com George H. Williams

    Good point. I don’t know when or why I started using the asterix pre-fix as a wild card. But obviously it’s not necessary since the search results are the same with or without it.

  • http://ProfHacker.com George H. Williams

    That’s a great idea. Thanks!

  • http://ProfHacker.com George H. Williams

    That’s very useful, especially when “hand-checking for plagiarism.”

  • http://ProfHacker.com George H. Williams

    True. See mbelvadi’s comment above.

  • http://ProfHacker.com George H. Williams

    There are many things you can do through that interface, of course, but it’s faster to type the search in on the main page. And there are some advanced searches that you can’t pull off using the advanced search interface.

  • http://ProfHacker.com George H. Williams

    I don’t know, but my guess would be that it’s easier to implement more advanced boolean searching when all of the entries in your database have a regular structure for the metadata. Consider how heterogenous all of the files on the Web are: they don’t all consistently have metadata describing–for example–date of publication, authorship, subject headings, language, and the like.

    Considering how resource-intensive many of Google’s services are (speech recognition, video editing…), I don’t think processing time is the reason.

  • http://ProfHacker.com George H. Williams

    That’s a good idea. I’ve done something similar in my classes and in my own searching.

  • http://ProfHacker.com George H. Williams

    One of my favorites, without a doubt. (And I did include a link to that “features” page in my original post above. It’s a good overview of several useful features.)

  • http://ProfHacker.com George H. Williams

    Looks interesting (based on a quick read of their about page), but I think I need to explore further to fully understand what’s going on.

  • mbelvadi

    This is kind of a super-Google trick, but you can create Google-based “custom search engines” (CSEs) whereby you select a mix of sites (by full hostname or wildcards) and generate a Google search box that just includes results from those sites, which you can then place the html code for on your own web page. You can even tag the sites into subcategories. So for instance, a librarian in Canada maintains a CSE for Canadian government web sites, federal, provincial, and municipal, which many other librarians use as well, and after conducting a standard Google search in it, you are offered the ability to limit the results to just the federal, or provincial, or municipal sites within the results.
    If you like the “site:” trick, but start to visualize making a really huge string of “site:this OR site:that OR site:whatever…..”  as some kind of template to base other searches on, then what you want is to make a CSE with your site list.

  • http://about.me/jbj Jason B. Jones

    Also, see this guest post by David Morgan on using GCalc in a physics class: http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/how-to-use-googles-calculator-in-a-physics-class/22806

  • jimptas

    Rather than trying to trick Google Search or apply code to do academically related search, I find it easier to use Academic Search (http://academic.research.microsoft.com).  I find it more robust than Google Scholar.  The co-author and citation visual explorers are especially cool.

  • http://about.me/jbj Jason B. Jones

    I’d never heard of that–and then realized it was because I don’t think Academic Search hits humanities titles. Which is too bad for me, b/c it is nifty looking!

  • jimptas

    Humanities titles are in the process of being added.

  • drjeff

    Lexis/Nexis requires a degree of expertise on the part of its users to get the results they’re looking for.  Google does not feel that’s a winning strategy for them.  (I’m inclined not to argue.)   I think they want to avoid creating a feature that people could invoke accidentally; that would end up giving people NOT the results they were looking for.  Consider that 1% of Google users (at most) would use a robust system of boolean searching, if they had one.

  • drjeff

    FWIW, I don’t find .edu or .org sites to be generally more authoritative than .com sites.  And, excepting scientific research, the most authoritative sites are usually newspapers and magazines’ (.com) sites.  Even for science, if you get an article by Gina Kolata on NYTimes.com, you’re a lucky dog.

    Full disclosure: I’m the webmaster of a .edu science-related site.

  • teqsa

    Just checked it out and discovered that date of publication isn’t included in the results display. Annoying.

  • http://ProfHacker.com George H. Williams

    Nice!

    However, not all of my students’ research assignment require materials published in academic venues. Government sites, for example, are often a good source of statistical information (among other things).

  • mbelvadi

    Will Microsoft allow Academic Search to be used as a target for “federated search” products? Google has explicitly told library vendors and librarians that its Google Scholar may NOT be, which is a very sore point for many of us. For those not in the library biz, a federated search product is a special server that can be configured to search lots of research databases across completely different vendors and brings the results together into a common result list and interface, often even removing duplicate results (“de-duping”). Since the library research industry is pretty fractured and students get very confused by all the choices (the University of Toronto lists over 1,000 different databases available!), these “combo” products are pretty valuable especially when trying to help lower undergraduates with interdisciplinary, English-101-type topics.  Everyone wants to include Google Scholar as one of the “target” services, but legally can’t. I’ll bet many libraries would even pay Google for the privilege, but that’s not a service Google is prepared to sell right now. There’s an opportunity here for Microsoft.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Alan-Bilansky/773560413 Alan Bilansky

    For something completely different, you can try Wolfram Alpha (http://www.wolframalpha.com/), a computational search engine.  It doesn’t return straightforward search results, but tries to compute the answer to your question, with footnotes for its data.

  • panacea

    That’s what happens when you break the chain of command.

  • willynilly

    If the North Central Regional Accrediting body is not all over this situation in very short order they are derelict in their responsibilities.  Boards of Trustees DO NOT ADMINISTER colleges.  They provide oversight functions.  One of the “Standards” of accreditation within all of the Congressionally Authorized Regional Accrediting Bodies is NO TRUSTE INTERFERENCE into the daily operation of the institution.  If North Central does not act immediatey and decisively in this instance, Congress should not renew its status when it next comes up for review.  The Hocking Trustee Board, among a long list of disturbing deficiencies, has as its Chair, a former Superintendent of Schools.  History demonstrates that in 99% of the instances of a person of this background serving as a college trustee Chair, disaster is inevitable.  And so, you now have it at hand.

  • ellenhunt

    That’s what happens when you fall into a passel of good-ol-boys and girls who are used to a good-ol-boy running things. I am certain that the board of “trustees” has one or two people who fancy themselves running the college who are of the puppeteer variety. Feh!

  • davi2665

    Some one needs to follow up on the next appointment.  It will likely be a groveling sycophant with close ties to several of the good ol’ boys on the board.  How disgraceful.  Even though Ron Erickson shot himself in the foot by going public on the micromanagement by the board, at least it was exposed rather than the usual course of being swept under the rug while waiting for the next victim to be appointed.

  • autodidactwithdegree

    What choice did he have?

    The school, like all schools in Ohio on the quarter system, is in the process of converting to semesters.  With this conversion comes re-accreditation.  This is the worst time the Board could have chosen to remove Dr. Erickson.  The current interim president, a long-time administrator at Hocking, doesn’t have a history of making waves or standing up to authority or of being a hard-ass.  Unless a lot changes quickly and in a very positive manner, which is unlikely under the circumstances, the union should be forewarned they are in danger of extinction.  If Hocking is not accredited, it will not qualify for Federal student aid money.  Most Hocking students are entirely dependent on these grants and loans.  So suddenly not only an effective President will have disappeared, but most of the student body will have as well.  Faculty and staff:  You will not have a job if the students cannot get financial aid to attend Hocking.

    Therefore, for your own sakes, close ranks and support Erickson.  For all your bellyaching, you have no idea how good you have had it, working at Hocking.  You have no clue what the local economy is really like or how you will fare if you lose your jobs.

  • raza_khan

    Okay… I did not find that Ron Erickson being ousted as a worthy news… BUT… what I did find news worthy was tthat John Light “retired” amid allegations of misspending??  Huh???  I thought if you do that,  you get fired, arrested and executed if found guilty (oh.. I was in TX for a minute there..back to non-executable states)… put behind slammer… and he simply retired??

    Unbelievable at what is happening at some institutions!

    Raza
    ________________________
    Raza Khan, Ph.D.
    Dr.Raza.Khan@gmail.com

  • http://www.domainnamessecret.com/ Louis Cui

    I have a question, how to find a .doc document from .org website?

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