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

Sergey Brin

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

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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