Effective Googling!

Hardik Thakkar
CMED Infosys Technologies

How Old is Google?

Answer: 9 years (10 on September 7, 2008) In September of 1998, Google Inc. opened its door in Menlo Park, CA.
http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/history.html#1995)

More About Google

Google is a play on the word googol which is the mathematical term for 1 followed by 100 zeros and reflects the company's mission to organize the immense, seemingly infinite amount of information available on the web.

A Unique Company
Google founders
Larry Page
Number of employees: Worldwide, Google employed 10,000 full-time employees as of now Work Environment: Informal: Lava lamps, door on sawhorses as desks, exercise balls for chairs, and dogs roaming the halls Google: The interface is clear and simple. Pages load instantly. Placement in search results is never sold to anyone. Advertising on the site must offer relevant content and not be a distraction. No pop-up ads allowed.
Source: http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/tenthings.html

Sergey Brin

Why do we love Google?

Size and scope: Now indexing over 20 billion web pages (conservative estimate). Relevance of Results: PageRank Diversity of Search: Image, News, Book Search, Scholar, Blog Search, Finance, Froogle, Video . . . and much, much more. Other Tools: Google Maps, Picasa, Blogger, Gmail, Calendar, Docs & Spreadsheets . . .
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But

We may love Google, but few users know how to use full search capabilities.

Effective Googling

How does Google interpret basic search?

Google places AND operator between all search terms entered in basic search box. Automatically searches for some plural/singular and grammatical variants.

You enter: news reader Google searches: news AND reader OR readers Does not search as exact phrase unless quotes present!
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Need Exact Phrase? Use quotation marks!

infosys billion dollar

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Expand Search With Synonym? Use a tilde

e.g.: ~infosys finds IT companies similar to Infosys

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Search by filetype (pdf, ppt, xls, doc)

e.g.: .Net Framework filetype:ppt

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Negative Search Terms

e.g.: nano car will return the results with word nano but not Tata Nano car

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Limit your search results to a particular web site

e.g.: sparsh site:infosys.com will get the pages from infosys.com where the word sparsh is referred `

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Search for sites that link to a particular website:

e.g.: link:infosys.com

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Youve found a useful website & want to find other sites like it:
e.g.: related:www.infosys.com

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Google is a Dictionary
Find definition of a word or a phrase? e.g.: define: scruples

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Google is a Calculator as well

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Google is Converter too..!

Convert currency, units and a lot more

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More Search Operators

allinanchor: allintext: allintitle: allinurl: cache: group: info: time weather

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Use Specialty Search Functions

Google News: news.google.com Google Images: images.google.com Google Blog Search: blogsearch.google.com Google Finance: finance.google.com Google Scholar: scholar.google.com Google Book Search: books.google.com

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Google News Alerts

Tracking an event in the news? Create your own Google News alert its free! Can choose to monitor latest developments on web pages, blogs, Google news, Google discussion group pages, or all of these sources.

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Google Scholar

Covers: law, medicine, social sciences, arts, humanities, business, & finance. Included items: peer-reviewed papers, theses, book excerpts, abstracts & full-text articles Sources for items: academic publisher web pages, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities, & other scholarly organizations.
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Google Book Search

Searches full text of indexed books. If work is in public domain, full contents usually available. If not, users can view bibliographic info (author, title, publisher) and perhaps some excerpts. Library partners: UC, Princeton, Stanford, Univ. of Michigan, Univ. of Texas, Oxford, UVA, Univ. of Wisconsin,
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Something exciting at last

Localized search Movie search Code search

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local.google.co.in
Effective localized search solution

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google.co.in/movies
Find theatres running your desired movies in your city..wow

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google.com/ codesearch
search public source code

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Google hack for finding movies/music

(warning: Not to be tried at office but home!) e.g.: intitle:index.of(mp3|mp4|avi|dat|mpeg) mummy

Interesting stuff

Google Docs Google Calendar Google Reader Google Gear Google App Engine Google Sites Google Sets Google Trends and so on

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PageRank

PageRank explained by Google: Google interprets a link on page A going to page B as a vote -- by page A, for page B. Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily.
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