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"User-Friendly" Google Google is a powerful, "user-friendly," search engine that has rapidly gained popularity among Internet searchers. The search engine makes heavy use of "link popularity" as a way to rank web sites. Google examines the number of other web pages that link to an individual web page. The more web pages that link to a specific web page, the more likely the web page contains important content. When presenting the matches to a search, Google moves those pages that contain a high degree of "link popularity" to the top of the results list. This display process can be especially helpful in finding useful sites in response to broad searches such as "cars" and "travel." Because users across the web have in essence voted for good sites by linking to them, the top results in Google should be of more value to the searcher. The system works so well that Google has gained wide-spread praise for its high relevancy. The idea for Google came from two Ph.D. candidates at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the cofounders, were working on a thesis/research project which dealt with databases and information retrieval technology which could stay abreast of the rapidly-expanding Internet. Google officially started in 1998 at http://www.google.stanford.edu. Google Options Below is the main, uncluttered, search screen of Google which has a very different look from Yahoo. On this screen you can begin a search for your topic by entering keywords in the search box. Notice that the word "Web" is highlighted.
Google also has a comprehensive image database in which you search only for photographs, drawings, artwork, etc. which appear on the web. From the main page click on "Images" and this is the page that you will see:
You can also "post and read comments in the Usenet discussion forums." Click on "Groups" from the main search page and you will see this screen:
You can also search for information on your topic by using subject categories. Google hires librarians and indexers to select and organize the "best" web pages. This is similar to how a public or academic library purchases and catalogs print resources for it's collection. Google's subject categories are similar to those used by Yahoo. Click on the "Directory" tap from the main search screen and you will see this screen:
Searching Google Keyword Search Google will search for the words that you enter in the search box and will return pages that are an exact match. The more words you enter in the string, the narrower the search. We will attempt to locate information on the effects of television violence on children:
The search terms that we entered are television media violence children. If you do not put anything between your search terms, Google assumes that you are doing a Boolean AND search. Boolean AND searches tell a database to only locate items that contain all of your words. In our example that means that a web page would have to contain all the terms of our search: television, media, violence and children. Google is NOT case sensitive so it does not matter if you use capital letters at the beginning of the word. Google does not support truncation, so don't try to use the familiar truncation symbols such as #, ?, or *. To find and locate variations of a word you must perform a separate search with each variant or equivalent term. You could also use the Boolean operator "OR" to locate word variants. To locate web pages with some from of the concept "child" you could search for: child OR children OR kid OR kids. Click on "Google Search" and see the results of your search:
Google lists the most relevant "top ten" hits of your search first. Google also lists the subject category under which your topic falls in the Google Directory: Society>Issues>Violence>Media>Television. As you scroll down the results list you will see more web pages that match your search topic.
The search terms that you entered are highlighted in bold. For even more precise searches try phrase searching. Phrase Searching Search for phrases (words adjacent to each other) by enclosing the words in "quotes." Enter the phrase "television violence" followed by children (not in quotes). Remember that Google understands AND between words. In this search you are asking Google to search for the phrase "television violence" AND children. Your results are different from the first search:
Some Special Searches You might also want to try the following search option:
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Now that we
have finished the lesson, try searching Google yourself. Go to the
Google Guided
Exercise now.
