Advanced Internet Searching

Advanced Internet Searching

Introduction
This training resource is designed to provide you with information on advanced internet searching - how to search the internet quicker and more effectively. It will cover the use of search engines, different types of search engine and so on.

Types of internet search engine

Free text search engines

Ask
Bing
Exalead
Gigablast
Google
Yahoo

This is just a tiny selection - you can find others available on my 'Which search engine when' page, my list of Web search engines, or my Web Search blog.

Google Specific
Google
Unsafe Search on Google
Google Personalised
GooFresh
GAPS (Google Proximity Search)
Google Maps (UK)
Google Video
Google Scholar
Google Reader for reading RSS feeds
Google Mobile (UK)
Google Alerts
Froogle (UK)
Google Blog Search
Google Directory
Google Laboratory
Soople
Simply Google

Directory or Index based search engines

Yahoo!
Open Directory Project

Multi or Meta search engines

Ixquick
TurboScout
Trovando

Site or subject specific search engines

BT enquiries
Geneological databases

Social media search engines

Collecta
Social Mention
Whostalkin

How do search engines actually work?

Depends on the type of search engine. Some will emply robot or spider programs that wander around the web, and when they find a new page or site will copy the data back to their home base and will include the information when they next update their index. Other search engines, such as the Directory based services rely in web page authors visiting the engines and registering directly.
Those search engines that employ a ranking service will then also take into account a variety of things about the web page that they have returned to the user at the completition of a search. Some of the things that will be considered are:

Location of the word in the title element
Location of the word in the major headings on a page
Number of times the words are found
Number of words found against the number of words asked for
Proximity of the terms to each other
Terms in the URL
Keyword density

Searching using Google

This cheat sheet is taken in part from the one provided by Google at http://www.google.com/help/cheatsheet.html

Basic search

Vacation Russia Find all pages containing Vacation and Russia, though not necessarily next to each other

Russia OR England Find all pages containing Russia or England

"holidays in Europe" Find all pages that contain that exact search string

virus -computer Find pages that contain virus, but exclude any that mention computer

~guide Finds the word guide and any similar words as a synonym search

blind * mouse both words with anothe word in between

blind ** mouse with other words in between

filetype:doc/pdf/xls/ppt/swf Various different file types - more available

Advanced Search

define:word Defines a word, with links to associated websites

site:www.philb.com Limits the search to one particular site

site:.uk Limits the search to sites that end in www.something.uk

site:.ac.uk As above, but for UK academic sites

site:.gov.uk As above, for for UK govt. sites

[#]..[#] Search within a range of numbers eg dvd player $100..$250

date: 3 Search only a range of months

safesearch: Exclude adult-content

allintitle: Chrome All words in the title element

allinurl: Chrome All words in the URL

allinanchor: Chrome All words in linking text

link:www.philb.com Linked pages

related:www.philb.com Related/similar pages

23 in roman numerals Changes numbers to Roman Numerals

1 inch in mm Changes inches to millimetres

term a term b term b etc More precise searching (Google Sinker)

whois philb.com Information on a specific website

ba123 Flight information

£100 in chinese currency Currency checking

time place To see what the exact time is somewhere else

Inquotes Check to see what people are saying about a subject

Things to do Video of 52 different things to do at Google

Insights into Search See what people are searching for

Google custom search engines Not a Google listing, but useful

site:google.com inurl:cse inurl:coop Official way of searching custom search engines

This is the first of a 2 page article. Follow the link for the second page of Advanced Internet Searching.