By Marianne Lenox, HMCPL Staff Training and Development CoordinatorCreated November 2006

Extreme Google

What is "Google"? Definition: Googol

Pronunciation: 'gü-"golFunction: nounGoogle is a play on the word googol, which was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, and was popularized in the book, "Mathematics and the Imagination" by Kasner and James Newman. It refers to the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. Google's use of the term reflects the company's mission to organize the immense, seemingly infinite amount of information available on the web.

Originally called "Backrub", the logic behind the Google search engine was develop by graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University in 1995. Their first place of business was literally a garage. The garage location was chosen because it had a washer/dryer and a hot tub out back, they were already serving 10,000 searches a day.

http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html

How We Got Here....

For the last 5 years, Google has been the undisputed leader in online search technology.

Before Google; Altavista, FAST, and Inktomi had the largest databases; but suffered from poorer search algorithms.

Google's profit is partially ad driven, but sponsors do not garner higher ratings in searches.

Localization Language options Toolbar Blogger Translation Calculator Stock Quotes Phonebook Newsgroups

Searching and Beyond...

Programming tools Intra-network

searches Print searching Desktop search Mobile Access News Spell Checker Pricing

For the ultimate Google search page check this out: http://www.google.com/help/features.html

(right click and choose open in a new window)

Search Engine Supremacy

http://searchenginewatch.com/reports/article.php/2156451

How Big is Google?

http://searchenginewatch.com/reports/article.php/2156481

Searches Per Day in Millions

250

167

80

45

80

Google

Yahoo/Overture

Inktomi

Looksmart

Others

http://searchenginewatch.com/reports/article.php/2156461

So How Does Google Work?

Crawls and indexes web pages et al. Stores copies of web pages and

graphics on their caching servers Presents users with simple front end

to query the database of cached pages

Returns search results in a ordered fashion based upon relevancy

Anatomy of a Search

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/search-engine1.htm

Server Side Client Side

What Can Google Search?

Adobe Portable Document Format (pdf) Adobe PostScript (ps) Lotus 1-2-3 (wk1, wk2, wk3, wk4, wk5, wki, wks, wku) Lotus WordPro (lwp) MacWrite (mw) Microsoft Excel (xls) Microsoft PowerPoint (ppt) Microsoft Word (doc) Microsoft Works (wks, wps, wdb) Microsoft Write (wri) Rich Text Format (rtf) Shockwave Flash (swf) Text (ans, txt)

So What Determines Page Relevance and Rating?

Exact Phrase: are your keywords found as an exact phrase in any pages?

Adjacency: how close are your keywords to each other?

Weighting: how many times do the keywords appear in the page?

PageRank/Links: How many links point to the page? How many links are actually in the page?

Equation: (Exact Phrase Hit)+(AdjacencyFactor)+(Weight) * (PageRank/Links)

From: Google 201, Advanced Googology - Patrick Crispen, CSU

Enough! How Do I Get Results?

Pick your keywords carefully & be specific

Do NOT exceed 10 keywords Use Boolean modifiers Use advanced operators Google ignores some words*:a, about, an, and, are, as, at, be, by, from, how, i, in, is, it, of, on, or, that, the, this, to, we, what, when, where, which, with

*From: Google 201, Advanced Googology - Patrick Crispen, CSU

Google's Boolean Modifiers

AND is always implied. OR: Escobar (Narcotics OR

Cocaine) "-" = NOT: Escobar -Pablo "+" = MUST: Escobar +Roberto Use quotes for exact phrase

matching: "nobody puts baby in a corner"

OR"there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know."

Wildcards

Google supports word wildcards but NOT stemming. "It's the end of the * as we know it" works. but "American Psycho*" won't get you decent results

on American Psychology or American Psychophysics.

Exercise #1

Alright class, it’s time for some hands on experience….

http://intranet/training/google/ex1.htm

(Right click and open in a new window)

Advanced Operators

cache: define: info: intext: intitle: inurl: link: related: stocks:

filetype: numrange

1973..2005 source: phonebook:

http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators.html

Exercise #2

Ready for another exercise?

http://intranet/training/google/ex2.htm

(Right click and open in a new window)

Advanced Searching

Advanced Search Page: http://www.google.com/advanced_search

Extras...

Translation and Language options - over 100 to choose from: http://www.google.com/language_tools

Stock Quotes - enter stocks:, example: stocks:GOOG Newsgroups - http://groups.google.com Calculator - "1024 minus 768" or "12 to the 10 power" Froogle - http://froogle.google.com Images - http://images.google.com Spell Checking - just type it in: "convienence" Blogger - http://www.blogger.com/start

Extras can be found at http://www.google.com/help/features.html

Bibliography and Further Research

Search Engine Watch:http://searchenginewatch.com

Google Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Toolsby Tara Calishain, Rael Domfest

Johnny I Hack Stuff:http://johnny.ihackstuff.com

Google:http://www.google.com

HowStuffWorks:http://computer.howstuffworks.com/search-engine1.htm

Google Guidehttp://www.googleguide.com/

Google Search tips for 2005http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2005-09-29-

n85.html

Class Evaluation

Please visit this page to complete your evaluation of this class:

http://intranet/forms/classevaluation.shtml

THANK YOU!

Happy Googling!