Google works in mysterious ways - even their help screens don't tell all. But here are some ideas to improve your Googling.

Ranking
Ranking means the order in which the hits are presented. It is definitely not random - good ranking is a search engine's most prized secret. After some research, Patrick Crispen believes that Google first looks at your search terms as if they were a phrase, then how closely the words show up together, then how many times the word appears, then if other pages have linked to the page and lastly gives a lower ranking to pages containing a lot of links off the page.

This means that you can change your result ranking by changing the order in which you type in the terms, especially if the search has a large number of terms. You will want to put the more crucial word first. It also means that more popular and known pages will come up before less known pages (like a citation ranking).

Chocolate and Vanilla
A little Boolean logic - Google uses and as its default. That is, the intersection of the sets of the terms. Chocolate and vanilla. However if you actually type and you will get an error message.

OR
Google will allow the Boolean "OR", as long as it is written in capital letters. For example, "raisin oatmeal cookies" OR "peanut butter cookies" will give you either cookie, as opposed to the usual Google and that will give you only pages with both cookies (why am I getting hungry?)

phrases
Although Google often searches your string as a phrase, you can tighten the search by putting the text in quotation marks. Check the difference between: Managerial Style as a Behavioral Predictor of Organizational Climate and "Managerial Style as a Behavioral Predictor of Organizational Climate"

stop words
Stop words are words that the system ignores, mostly because they are too common and meaningless. Patrick Crispen estimates that Google's main list is: a, about, an, and, are, as, be, by, from, how, i, in, is, it, of, on, or, that, this, to, we, what, when, where, which, with.

If you absolutely need the stop word, you can place it inside a phrase or put a plus (+) in front of it. The + allows you to search a word from the stop list.

10 word limit
There is a limit of ten words for a search. You can get around this by leaving out the stop words to make the search string shorter. This is crucial when you are searching article titles.

wildcards *
Google seriously lacks truncation. But there is a full-word wildcard within phrases. "Placido Domingo was * in" gives you the expected "was born in" but also "was flying in", "was awarded in" (what about was SINGING in??)

advanced search modifiers
If you have ever used the pulldown menus of advanced search, you may have noticed some elements like site:, source: etc. These work pretty well and allow you to search for specific file types (filetype:ppt) or within one newspaper in Google News (source:fayetteville_online). I especially like filetype:pdf as a quality filter (assuming that pdf files are written by a better class of writers).

intitle
Each web page, if written properly, has a title (the title of this page is Better Googling Part II). Searching for intitle:"The Mikado" gives all the pages where the page writer on purpose or by accident gave that phrase as the page's title. Especially useful for short phrases - this will avoid all those pages that list every opera Gilbert and Sullivan wrote but will include Mikado Helicopters.

Google does not really advertise these but there are more advanced search operators listed at: Advanced Operators

not
Google has a "not" (andnot) function. Type - (minus) before the term. Useful when the word has a few meanings (eg pirates of penzance not of baseball). I have used it to weed out sites that have spammed the results; in preparing this page, a site called xav flooded the engine, I merely searched -xav and got rid of it.

site and domain
You can limit your search to a single site with site:jct.ac.il. This is good for sites that have useless search engines and also for back issues of journals and newspapers. Domain is good for limiting a type of site (only commercial, only educational). Restricting to domain:il removes most (not all) of the anti-Semites and missionaries when doing a Jewish content search.

Google has their own page for refining your search.

And even some help pages written in Hebrew:
help
advanced Hebrew search

Hebrew
Speaking of "right to left", Google can and does work in Hebrew as best as it can. The Hebrew site, google.co.il gives the search page in Hebrew and the Google Language preferences can search for Hebrew language texts regardless of the Google interface. You should also run your search with a domain:il setting. This is because the page may have the wrong language code or have mixed languages so this will pick up more pages, for example pages written in Hebrew with English keywords. Hebrew and html do not mix very well so strange things can and do happen. Often the page is flipped backwards, or the Hebrew fonts show up like Swedish. If this happens, right click the mouse and look for "encoding" and try a different choice.

Mountain View we have a melborp
Sometimes the page, or the search engine, has the direction wrong. This sounds strange, but you may find a few more pages by typing in the search term - backwards.

Patrick Crispen has prepared an excellent PowerPoint presentation that you can download and read at: Netsquirrel Classroom Look for the PowerPoint file "Google 201 - Advanced Googology"

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Chana Lajcher - Library Director
Jerusalem College of Technology
Jerusalem, Israel