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.
7 comments:
L'wing,
VERY useful information.
Here's a question for you... If I am providing a hyper-link within my webpage or on my blog, is there a way to cache that link and it's information so that in a year or two someone can still read the article or access the information.
I am a cyber dummy.
I'm going through bat and bride withdrawal. When are you coming back here?
You can't cache what is on another page. The reader would have to try to google it and hope that they have cached it. You could post the entire text on your blog. Blogger (owned by Google!) does a pretty good job of keeping all your old posts (as long as your blog remains, so do your posts. But that could always change.)
Wow, that seems a little impractical to post the entire text of an article within a blog entry. Is there a way within Blogger to cache articles, somewhere in the sidebar, or in a database file?
I don't know everything that Blogger is capable of, but this is something I've wondered about before.
Cyber Dummy strikes again.
Blogger doesn't really cache anything, google does when it sends out its spiderbots to index the web. So it's possible that whatever you link to is already cached by google.
I don't know of any way for a user to cache anything. To guarantee that it will stay around, all you can do is post it to your own webspace.
You are better than Blogger's tech support.
The cache option has come in handy for me a couple of times. Good post. Thanks for the tip.
Nice info. Especially the option to look at more than 10 posts per page. I never even considered it.
You rock.
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