March 13, 2004

WHEN you browse on the web, most engines return heaps of irrelevant results which makes the process tedious and time-consuing. To avoid this frustration, and to obtain exactly what you are looking for, you have to become familiar with techniques and make use of all the features provided in the best search engines.

There are a number of search engines out there — Yahoo!, MSN, AltaVista, etc. to name a few. However, with the remarkably powerful and fast search algorithms; and access to more than six billion items (4.28 billion web pages, 880 million images, 845 million Usenet messages, Google — Established by two Stanford PhD students — is recognized as the best search engine on the World Wide Web. The popularity of Google is evinced by the fact that the verbs “googling” or “to google” is often used generically to mean “to search the web.”

Google’s front page is deceptively simple, and is designed in order to reduce the download time. It is a full-text search engine and indexes entire web pages (not just titles and descriptions). Google also caches much of the content that it indexes and is a reflection of the web. Fetching this cached content (by clicking on the “Cached” link) is often faster than going to the original. Viewing “Cached” content can be very useful if the original is not available (or the link is broken) or the network is down, but of course cached content may not be up-to-date.

Google allows searching for materials from a several countries and in multiple languages. Click “Language Tools” link on the front page for this. Google also provides translation option which makes it possible to get a block of text or an entire web page translated in the desired language. At present, this features is available only for a few languages.

Interestingly, Google interface is also available in Urdu and Punjabi. You can search for pages located in Pakistan . So far, you cannot search for pages in Urdu.

Google has revolutionized searching on the web by using a clever system (or algorithm) called “PageRank.” It combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to a given search query. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for the query. Read more about this at . This knowledge can be useful to get a high ranking for your website at Google.


‘I’m feeling lucky’?

You must have seen the button titled “I’m Feeling Lucky” on Google front page. This feature is very useful when you know exactly what you are looking for but aren’t completely sure of the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) or in other words the web address. For instance, when you hit for “Dawn” in the query field and click the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, it will take you directly to Dawn’s site at . Similarly, entering “Pakistan Government” will take you directly to .

The search engine utilizes the “Open Directory Project” (ODP), also known as DMoz (for Directory Mozilla), to provide a searchable subject index at . It allows you to freely use the directory in which websites are organized into a number of broad categories under which are many more specific subcategories. Google’s directory indexes sites (not pages) and is ideal for more general searching or to narrow down the search.

Google image search: Comprising more than 880 million images, it enables users to find electronic images. Search results include a thumbnail, name, size, and the source URL.

Google news: Information culled from approximately 4,500 news sources worldwide, it is a news service compiled solely by computer algorithms without human intervention. Topics are updated continuously throughout the day. “Sort by date” and “Sort by relevance” functions are very useful.

Google groups: This is a 20-year archive of Usenet conversations. It serves as a powerful reference tool. You can restrict your searches to a certain newsgroup, newsgroup topic, subject, author, and message ID. Date range searching is supported. Links to these services (Images, Groups, News) are available on the front page.

Some special syntaxes are used to filter results (or to narrow down the search) and to help guide the Google search engine in understanding what someone is looking for. Someone can search within the page (certain components of a page, for instance, title, URL), kinds of pages, kinds of content (Google searches 12 main file types in addition to HTML, for instance, DOC, PDF, PPT, TXT), and special collections (for example, restrict the search to Images, Groups, Directory, News). Best of all, these special syntaxes are not mutually exclusive. Google converts all file types it searches to either HTML or text. The search results include a link to either “View as HTML” or “View as Text”. This gives you faster access to the file and removes the need for you to have the original application.

Calculator: Google can be used to evaluate mathematical expressions. Simply enter the calculation you’d like done into the search box and hit the “Enter” key or click on the button titled “Google Search.” The Google calculator goes beyond basic arithmetic and can solve math problems involving more complicated math, units of measure and conversions, and physical constants. Some examples are available at .

Toolbar: Google searching capabilities can be integrated into the browser. This official toolbar (or add-on) is currently only available for Microsoft Internet Explorer. It’s the only way you can see exactly what a site’s PageRank is. The functionalities integrated with the latest version include Search Country, Search Froogle, Pop-up Blocker, AutoFill, BlogThis and Options. Google toolbar can be downloaded at for free of charge. A third-party toolbar for Mozilla and Netscape browsers is available at . Some free browsers (for instance, Avant Browser, Mozilla Firefox) have built-in Google toolbar.

Your computer is idle: You may visit , to donate your computer’s unused cycles to worthy scientific causes, by turning on “Google Compute” — a new feature for the Google Toolbar.

Books: Google Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools published by O’Reilly & Associates is by far the best book written about Google, and I recommend it to every serious net user. More information is available at after subscription.

Another e-book written by Chris Carpenter called Google Cash that teaches step by step how to succeed with Google AdWords , which is one of the hottest forms of advertising around. Google AdWords’ pricing is on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis. In this book you will discover how people are making money on the largest (and “Best Paid Placement Service” award holder) search engine of the web.

Google supports several advanced operators which can be selected from Google’s “Advanced Search” page (click on the Advanced Search link for this) or entered directly into the Google search box (using syntax). It is best and preferable to use the syntax for advanced search because some of the special operators are not accessible from “Advanced Search” page. Entering operators directly is easy, more rewarding, and saves time. Visit to learn more.

Customized interfaces for Google can also be used and coded. One example is available at . The New Internet Search project at provides an effective search query management system. This project incorporates the ability to use a question, not keyword(s) as a search query.

By now you must have realized that browsing and searching internet with Google can be a really rewarding. So as the Google Friends Newsletter archive says, “Have fun and keep googling!”

The writer is a young scholar of electrical engineering at the University of Engineering & Technology, Lahore

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