Google Tips

We have compiled a list of 10 free Google tips that you can use to further enhance your website's content or simply for your own personal searches.

Word Order

Rearranging your query can have quite an effect. Its hard to believe that the order of your search can have such an effect. The order in which you put your keywords in a Google query can be every bit as important as the keywords themselves.

Changing the order can change not only your overall result count but the actual position of the results. While one might expect this of quote-enclosed phrases."Nerd Lib Software Labs" versus "Software Labs Nerd Lib" it may come as a surprise that it also affects sets of individual query words.

Google does yell you this: "Keep in mind that the order in which the terms are typed will affect the search results." But it does not tell you an explanation or suggestion as to how best to formulate a query to take full advantage of this fact.

Repetition Counts

Repetition matters when it comes to your keywords weight in your queries. Using keywords multiple times can have a very big impact on the results you get.

Try searching for traffic. The first result to come up should be www.internettrafficreport.com (Note: This article was written on 11/04/2005) Now try searching for traffic traffic. Notice that tennessean.com/traffic/ is now at the top?

You can try this with other keywords, putting additional keywords in if you want. You'll see that multiple keywords can have an impact on how the search results are positioned and the number of results returned.

Here is the theory behind it: Google searches for as many matches for each keyword or phrase you specify, stopping when it can't find any more. So traffic traffic returns pages with two occurrences of the keyword "traffic." traffic traffic traffic returns the same results. Why?! The answer is because Google can't do find any more than two occurrences of "traffic" in any single page.

Date-Range Searching

Before diving into the actual usage of the date-range searching function, there are a few things you should understand. The first is this: a date-range search has nothing to do with the creation date of the content and everything to do with the date the content was actually indexed. If I create a page today November 4th 2005 and Google doesn't index it until November 15th 2005, for the purposes of a daterange search the date would be November 15th 2005.

The second thing is that Google can index pages several times, and each time it does so the date on it changes. So don't count on a date-range search staying consistent from day to day. The daterange: timestamp can change when a page is indexed more than one time. Whether it does change depends on whether the content of the page has changed.

Third, Google doesn't "stand behind" the results of a search done using the date-range syntaxes. So if you get a weird result, you can't complain to them. Google would rather you use the daterange options on their advanced search page, but that page allows you to restrict your options only to the last three months, six months, or year.

The syntax of a date range search is:

daterange:startdate-enddate

Important Note: The date must be expressed as a Julian date There are many tools out there to generate a Julian date.

Using Full-Word Wildcards

Most search engines support a technique called "stemming." Stemming is adding a wildcard character, usually an asterisk but sometimes a question mark to part of your search term. Requesting the search engine to return variants of that query using the wildcard as a placeholder for the rest of the word at hand. For example, some* would find: something, somewhere, someone, etc.

Google offers the full-word wildcard. While you can't have a wildcard stand in for part of a word, you can insert a wildcard into a phrase and have the wildcard act as a substitute for one full word. Searching for "somewhere * rainbow", would yield the result "somewhere over the rainbow".

inurl: vs site:

The site: special syntax is perfect for those situations in which you want to restrict your search to a certain domain or domain suffix like "nerdlib.com" or "www.sustainehits.net" site:com. But it breaks down when you're trying to search for a site that exists beneath the main or default site (i.e., in a subdirectory like /~staff/files/).

Using the inurl: instead of the site: query has two advantages:

• You can use inurl: by itself without using any other keywords
• You can use it to search subdirectories.

Google API's

Google has an official list of API's that can be found here. With the Google Web APIs service, software developers can query billions of web pages directly from their own computer programs. Google uses the SOAP and WSDL standards so a developer can program in his or her favorite environment - such as Java, Perl, or Visual Studio .NET.

With Google API's you can search very specific info and drop it on your site for later use. Google also allows you to specify exact terms and keywords while parsing. You can develop something as simple as a webform that passes a users input back and forth to Google.

Googling with Bookmarklets

Create interactive bookmarklets to perform Google functions from the comfort of your own browser.

We all know what bookmarks are. What are bookmarklets? Bookmarklets are like bookmarks but with an extra bit of JavaScript magic added. This makes them more interactive then regular bookmarks; they can perform functions like opening a window, grabbing highlighted text from a web page, or submitting a query to a search engine. There are several bookmarklets that allow you to perform useful Google functions right from your browser.

Here are some example:

• English to Italian Translation
• Check Current URL
• List all links on page in new window

Google Groups

Usenet Groups, text-based discussion groups covering literally hundreds of thousands of topics, have been around since long before the World Wide Web. And now they're available for search and perusal as Google Groups (http://groups.google.com/). Its search interface is rather different from the Google web search, as all messages are divided into groups, and the groups themselves are divided into topics called hierarchies.

The Google Groups archive begins in 1981 and covers up to the present day. Over 200 million messages are archived. As you might imagine, that's a pretty big archive, covering literally decades of discussion.

Google Groups also allows you to participate in Usenet discussions, handy because not all ISPs provide access to Usenet these days (and even those that do tend to limit the number of newsgroups they carry). See the Google Groups posting FAQ (http://groups.google.com/googlegroups/posting_faq.html) for instructions on how to post to a newsgroup. You'll have to start with locating the group to which you want to post, and that means using the hierarchy.

Google Images

Google's image search starts with a plain keyword search. Images are indexed under a variety of keywords, some broader than others; be as specific as possible. If you're searching for cats, don't use cat as a keyword unless you don't mind getting results that include "cat scan." Use words that are more uniquely cat-related, like feline or kitten.

Narrow down your query as much as possible, using as few words as possible. A query like feline fang, which would get you over 3,000 results on Google, will get you no results on Google Image Search; in this case, cat fang works better.

Search results include a thumbnail, name, size (both pixels and kilobytes), and the URL where the picture is to be found. Clicking the pic ture will present a framed page, Google's thumbnail of the image at the top, and the page where the image originally appeared at the bottom.

Google News

We've all been a little spoiled by Google. It seems like whenever they release something, we expect it to be immediately. The search form functions like Google web search Search results group like news stories into clusters, providing title, source, date, and a brief summary (the link to the full story is included in the title). The only option beyond that searchers have is to sort their searches by relevance or date; there is no advanced search.

Google's News Search supports two special syntaxes.

• intitle:
  Finds words in an article headline. intitle:software news
• site:
  Finds articles from a particular source. miners site:reuters.com