Saturday, April 28, 2007

How do you Google?

Thought I'd post a couple of quick tips about searching with Google: advanced search and cache.

Most people that I've watched simply go to google.com, enter a word or phrase and press enter to start their search. But have you ever noticed the little link to the right of the text field that says advanced search? Following that link opens up a whole world of googling possibilities. First thing you'll notice is that there are four fields instead of a paltry one on normal google, each with a special purpose. Try using "with the exact phrase" and see if it improves your results.

You can also specify how many search results will be displayed per page. This is helpful if you know you will need to filter through a lot of results and you want them all to be on the same page. After all, going through 300 results with only 10 per page is very tedious, but with 100 per page it's a little more doable.

Now a quick note about Google's cache. When you get your search results back from google, there is the result link, a brief description or excerpt from the page itself, the actual URL for the page you will be linking to, and then a link called 'Cached'. This is useful when the page that holds your result is updated frequently (like a newspaper site or a web forum) and the content may no longer be on the site. When Google indexes the web, it stores a lot of its results in a cache, so if the main link doesn't load or no longer has your info due to an update, try the cache. The cached page probably won't have any of the original images, but the text will be there.

Hope you find this useful.