Basic Web Searches
Searching the Web is when you draw close to the life-form called Google. Entering a keyword is like venturing near the multilimbed Goddess of Knowledge and basking in the blazing glory of her wisdom. Or something. It’s just a Web search, but with results so astute that you can’t help wondering whether a person — a person who knows you very, very well — is lurking inside the machine.
The Google home page is a reactionary expression against the 1990s trend that turned search engines into busy, all-purpose information portals. Yahoo!, Lycos, Excite, and others engaged in portal wars in which victory seemed to depend on which site could clutter the page with the most horoscopes, weather forecasts, news headlines, and stock market bulletins. This loud and lavish competition resulted from the failure of plain search engines to earn the traffic and money necessary to keep their businesses afloat. They piled more features onto their pages and, in some cases, ruined their integrity by selling preferred placement in search results. During this mad gold rush, some specialty engines retained their primary focus on Web searching.
These days, in the reborn era of pure search, Google is not the only engine with a streamlined, gunk-free home page. In fact, major competitors such as Yahoo! and MSN Search have followed Google’s design lead on their search engine pages. In the former case, it’s not too much to say that Yahoo! Has explicitly copied Google, as you can see here: search.yahoo.com
Google has embraced the purity of searching with an ad-free, horoscopeabsent home page that leaves no doubt that searching is the task at hand. And its search results are so good that it has singly reshaped the search industry. Lycos, Excite, Netscape, and others barely register on anybody’s radar as search engines, attractive though they may be as broad Internet portals. Some of them use the Google engine to deliver Web search results. In fact, until 2004, Yahoo! used Google search results in response to user queries. Since then, Yahoo! has developed its own search engine. Still, for millions of people who discovered or rediscovered the rewards of Internet searching through Google, to search something is to Google it.
How Google remembers your preferences
When you set preferences in Google, the site is customized for you every time you visit it, as long as you’re using the same computer through which you set the preferences. To provide this convenience, Google must place a cookie (a small information file) in your computer. The site and the cookie high-five each other whenever you visit Google, and then the site appears according to your settings. For this system to
work, the reception of cookies must be turned on in your browser. Some people are militantly anti-cookie, claiming that the data files represent an invasion of computer privacy. Indeed, some sites plant cookies that track your Internet movements and identify you to advertisers. The truth is, Google’s cookie is fairly aggressive. It gets planted when you first visit the site, whether or not you visit the Preferences page.
Once planted, the Google cookie records your clicks in Google and builds a database of visitor behavior in its search results pages. For example, Google knows how often users click the first search result and to what extent they explore results lower on the page. Google uses this information to evaluate the effectiveness of
its service and to improve it. As to privacy, Google does indeed share aggregate information with advertisers and various third parties and even publicizes knowledge about how the service is used by its millions of
visitors. The key word is aggregate. Google’s privacy policy states that individual information is never divulged except by proper legal procedure, such as a warrant or a subpoena, or by individual consent. The privacy policy is published on this page: www.google.com/privacy.html
I have no problem with the Google cookie or with cookies in general. The convenience is helpful, and I don’t mind adding to the aggregate information. It’s rather comforting being a data droplet in Google’s information tsunami.
How insensitive!
Rules dictating when to use uppercase or lowercase letters have taken a beating in the Internet’s linguistic culture. The prevailing dialect of chat rooms, message boards, and e-mail discards the uppercase start to sentences as if it were an outgrown fad. Fortunately, nobody has to spruce up their typing habits for Google’s sake because the search engine is oblivious to case issues — the technical term is case-insensitive.
Choosing the right keywords
Google is possibly the most forgiving search engine ever created. You can type just about any darn thing into it and get good results. Sometimes you can even get away with sloppy spelling — Google often catches it and suggests the correct spelling. Much of the crafty keywording The golden rule in Internet searching is that more keywords deliver fewer results. So pile them on to narrow your search. With that technique, however, you run the risk of having conflicting or obfuscating keywords, creating a mixed bag of search results. Ideally, you want to concisely convey to Google what you need. I’ve found that two or three is the golden number of keywords to use in Google searches. Tracking software on my Web sites tells me which search queries get to my pages, and usually the two-word strings reach my best stuff. On the other end of the spectrum, many people
get good results by typing entire sentences in the keyword box. Google eliminates certain little words such as what and why, which might seem to devalue questions but doesn’t in practice.
Beware of words that have more than one meaning, especially if you search for one keyword at a time.
For power searching, in which the goal is not more results but fewer, better results, use the Advanced Search pages or the search operators, both described later in this chapter.
So let’s get to it. A six-year-old would find the Google home page easy to use. When you log on to Google’s home page, the mouse cursor is already waiting for you in the keyword search box. Type a word — any word. Or more than one. Or type a sentence in plain English. Press Enter or click the Google Search button. The results are on your screen within seconds. Note the I’m Feeling Lucky button next to the Google Search button. Clicking it instead of the Google Search button takes you directly to the top search result’s Web page instead of to the search results page. Only Google could dare to invite its users to skip the search results page and make it work out so well, so often. Try it. Remember: It’s not a random-search button, and it works only when you’ve typed a keyword.
The links atop the keyword box — Web, Images, Groups, News, Froogle, Local — take you to the home pages of those sections when clicked. If you’re on a search results page and click a tab, however, you get results from that link’s engine instantly. So, the tabs shuttle between home pages when you don’t have search results yet and shuttle between search results pages when you have one set of results in any area. On to the search results page. That’s where the action is.
