Finding stuff with google
In Google, basic Web searching couldn’t be simpler. The next chapter covers the basics, plus powerful ways of grabbing the information you want quickly. In addition to offering traditional Web searching, Google blends other types of searching into the basic keyword process:
Google Directory: Yahoo! set the standard of integrated searching (through a keyword engine) and browsing (through a topical directory). In the beginning, Yahoo!’s search engine searched the directory, which was carefully hand-constructed by a staff of editors. Yahoo! still builds its directory manually. Google also presents a topical directory for browsing, and you can search it separately from the basic Web search.
Newsgroup reader: Newsgroups make up the portion of the Internet called Usenet, which is far older (and probably still bigger in some measure) than the Web. It has more than fifty thousand groups, organized by topic, covering everything from astrophysics to David Letterman. Usenet is a hangout for academicians, pornographers, armchair pundits, and nearly everyone else. It’s a wild-and-wooly realm that’s normally accessed through a dedicated computer program called a newsgroup reader. Outlook Express and other e-mail programs contain newsgroupreading features. Google got into the act by purchasing the old Deja News, the groundbreaking company that first put Usenet on the Web. Google presents a deep archive of searchable newsgroup messages. Furthermore, it lets you establish an identity and post messages to groups, all through your Web browser.
Image finder: The Web is a picturesque place. Every photograph and drawing that you see on a Web page is a distinct file residing at a specific Internet location, and Google knows how to search that tremendous store of images.
Shopping assistant: This is one of Google’s huge, underappreciated strengths. For a long time, Froogle was unknown by just about everybody (who hadn’t read Google For Dummies, that is). Then Google moved it from obscurity to the home page of the British and American sites, and everybody saw the light. Comparisons to Yahoo! Shopping are difficult to avoid. The two services differ crucially, in that you never actually buy things through a Google transaction system as you sometimes can in Yahoo!. (For example, Google has no Google Wallet for storing credit card information for one-click purchasing.) Google has two main shopping services, Froogle and Google Catalogs. You use Froogle to find shopping sites that sell things you want. Google Catalogs — arguably the more fun of Google’s two shopping services — gives you a paper-free sense of accessing a mail-order universe.
Local search engine: Most search pundits and consumer focus groups agree that local searching will eventually be just as important as global Web searching. By local searching, I mean a searching for stuff that exists in a physical neighborhood — on streets near your home. All the big search engines are getting into local action, and Google is flat-out winning the race as of this writing. I’m not saying so to sell this book; nobody else has put together a combination of local search, local mapping, and local photography as Google has — and this is just the beginning.
International newsstand: In one of the most dramatic additions to the Google spectrum of features, Google News has replaced Yahoo! News as the default headline engine on countless screens. Almost unbelievable in its depth and range, Google News presents continually updated links to established news sources in dozens of countries, putting a global spin
on every story of the day.
These features (except for Google Directory) hook into Google’s home page, and it is easy to transfer a search from one of these engines to another. (Just click the links above the keyword box after entering a keyword.) At the same time, each of these engines stands on its own as an independent search tool. Other features, sketched next, exist more in the background but are no less important than the high-profile search realms.
