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Google Search Tips |
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Page 2 of 2 • Not all Googles are the same! Depending on your location, Google will forward you to a different country-specific version of Google with potentially different results to the same query. A search for [site:stormfront.org] from the US will yield hundreds of thousands of results, whereas the same search from Germany (at least if you don’t change the default redirect to Google.de) returns... zilch. Yes, Google does at times agree to country-specific censorship, like in Germany, France (Google web search), or China (Google News).
• Sometimes, Google warns you about its results, especially when they might seem like promoting hate sites (of course, only someone misunderstanding how Google works could think it’s them promoting hate sites). Enter [jew], and you will see a Google-sponsored link titled “Offensive Search Results” leading to this explanation.
• For some search queries, Google uses its own ads to offer jobs. Try entering [work at Google] and take a look at the right-hand advertisement titled e.g. “Work at Google Europe” (it turns out, at the moment, Google Switzerland is hiring).
• For some of the more popular “Googlebombed” results, like when you enter [failure] and the first hit is the biography of George W. Bush, Google displays explanatory ads titled “Why these results?”.
• While Google doesn’t do real Natural Language Processing yet, this is the ultimate goal for them and other search engines. A little What-If Video [WMV] illustrates how this could be useful in the future.
• Some say that whoever turns up first for the search query [president of the internet] is, well, the President of the internet. (I’m applying as well, and you can feel free to support me with this logo.)
• Google doesn’t have “stop words” anymore. Stop words traditionally are words like [the], [or] and similar which search engines tended to ignore. Sometimes, when you enter e.g. [to be or not to be], Google even decides to show some phrase search results in the middle of the page (separated by a line and information that these are phrase search results).
• There once was an easter-egg in the Google Calculator that made Google show “42” when you entered [The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything]. As I’ve been alerted in the forum, the easter egg only works lower-case.
• You can use the wildcard operator in phrases. This is helpful for finding song texts – let’s say you forgot a word or two, but you remember the gist, as in ["love you twice as much * oh love * *"] – and similar tasks.
• You can use the wildcard character without searching for anything specific at all, as in this phrase search: ["* * * * * * *"].
• Even though www.googl.com is nothing but a “typosquatter” (someone reserving a domain name containing a popular misspelling) and search queries return very different results than Google, the site is still getting paid by Google – because it uses Google AdSense.
• If you feel like restricting your search to university servers, you can write e.g. [c-tutorial site:.edu] to only search on the “edu” domain (you can also use Google Scholar). This works for country-domains like “de” or “it” as well.
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