| Be careful what you ask for.
Search mastodon
| Results:_______ |
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Comments: |
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Look at the results. If you click on cached you will see where your search terms were found. Google searches:
- In the page, title, and URL
- Terms occur in other pages which link to the page that was retrieved
- Terms that are somewhere in the web site of the page retrieved
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| Word Order Matters
Search plant eating
Search eating plant
Comments:
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Your first records retrieved are different because of "page rank".
Word order, popularity (how often linked to by other pages),
and importance (how many times the page is visited,
has high-ranking links, etc.) are important.
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| Simply simple searches.
Search perry mastodon
Search the phrase "perry mastodon"
Comments:
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Don't forget to use quotes.
Google automatically defaults to AND between words. Use quotes to search an exact phrase.
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| Stoic stemming.
Search mastodon plants
Search mastodon +plants
Search plant
Search plants
Comments:
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Google automatically applies "stemming" - searches for word variants.
In the first search you will get plant, plants, planting, etc.
Putting the "+" in front of a word stops stemming. Single word searches;
like the plant and plants search terms, are not stemmed.
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| The most common words.
Search where is perry mastodon
Search +where +is perry mastodon
Search "the perry mastodon"
Search the word where
Comments:
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Common words are ignored. Same results as using the search for perry mastodon.
Use "+" before a common word to have it searched
Common words in a phrase will be searched
A single word, even a common word, is searched
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| The amazing hyphen.
Search full-text
Search full text
Comments:
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Use of a hyphen will retrieve better results.
- Words with hyphen "full-text
- Words without the hyphen "full text"
- Single word without the hyphen "fulltext"
- Stemmed variants of the word with or without the hyphen
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| The tantalizing tilde.
Search mastodon ~food
Comments:
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The ~ (tilde) also searches for synonyms.
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| Oh! No! The OR!
Search perry mastodon
Search perry mastodon OR pachyderm
Comments:
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Words are also not stemmed when an OR is used.
A | (pipe) can be used instead of an OR;
Perry mastodon | pachyderm.
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| Wildcard in phrases.
Search edwin deicke
Search "edwin deicke"
Search "edwin * deicke"
Search "edwin * * deicke"
Comments:
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Use the * inside quotes to search any word in the phrase.
The search "edwin * deicke" will get any middle name or initial.
Combine a search with OR; "edwin deicke" OR "edwin * deicke"
to get all variations of the name.
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| No I don't want that term.
Search fossil
Search fossil -watch
Search fossil -watch -energy
Search fossil -watch -energy -site:com
Comments:
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Use a - (minus sign) to eliminate pages with certain words. You can also use a limiter to refine your search
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| Lovable limiters.
Search intitle:perry intitle:mastodon
Search intitle:perry OR intitle:mastodon
Search -intitle:perry intitle:mastodon
Search allintitle:perry mastodon
Search allintitle:mastodon -perry
Comments:
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Intitle: uses the title in the HTML code.
Other limiters that are helpful are:
| site: |
which are good for domain searches (com, edu, gov, org, etc.) |
| filetype: |
which allows you to search on filetype (pdf, doc, etc.) |
| daterange: |
but you must use the Julian date. Use
http://www.faganfinder.com/google.html to get a Julian date. Compares to the most
recent date Google's crawler visited a page and found changed content.
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Better Googling Handout