IMPROVING YOUR ONLINE EXPERIENCE
WITH GOOGLE
WE live in a miraculous day when
billions (if not trillions or more) of web pages of information about every
topic under the sun is available to us at a few clicks of a button.
BUT how do we find the “needle in
the haystack” we are looking for??
GOOGLE, and other search engines,
have made it easier and more intuitive to locate and access very specific
information in the sea of data that is the Internet.
Below are some tips to help make
your experience with Google and other search engines more helpful
See this pages – which has different
instructions based on what browser you use.
http://m.wikihow.com/Change-Your-Home-Page
Key Words
Realize that MORE keywords in your
search are not usually better than “less key words”. If you are searching
for a book that has a large number of words in the title – DON’T think you have
to type in the full title – doing so will not generally be more efficient or
helpful.
Also leave off words like “the”,
a”, “and”, “of” and similar words that most browsers will ignore anyway.
Rather – pick a few of the most unique or meaningful words from the
title and search on those – you may also consider adding a keyword that
represent the subject of your search. So for example if you are looking
for information about the movie “Gone With the Wind” consider doing a key word
search of GONE WIND MOVIE or even
just GONE WIND
Also at times the sequence of the
words is very important – especially when you find that you are getting a lot
of results that are not what you want – but do contain the search keys – but
not together in one single phrase.
You can search by word to word
phrases by encapsulating the phrase within double quotes.
For example compare the query
results from YANCEY FAMILY OF AMERICA
Versus the same query but with this
phrase within double quotes
Take advantage of the categories
that Google uses.
If you are looking for images of
a Yancey Family Bible – click on the image tab.
If you are looking for BOOKS about
Yancey genealogy – click on the BOOK category.
If you are looking for video
interview of persons by name Yancey – click on the video section. Other sectons include NEWS, MAPS
and SHOPPING.
Some Google databases may not be
obviously accessible via the home page.
This is the case with the newspaper archive
section.
Sometimes you will do a
Google search and find that the vast majority of the results are all of a
subject that is not what you are searching or.
For example if you search on Yancey
Bible – you will note a large amount of query results concerning the author
Philip Yancey. If none of these similar results are what you are looking
for - you can tell the browser to exclude any result that has the word
“PHILIP” in it. Exclusion keyword criteria should be prefixed
with a “minus sign” ( - )
So for example one could do a search
for YANCEY
BIBLE -PHILIP and get this result with the results concerning Philip
Yancey greatly reduced. Be sure NOT to include a space between the
minus sign and the next word.
Understand the terms URL, domain,
website, and web page.
A URL (Universal Resource Locator)
is the entity we usually refer to as a “web address”
This tells your computer where to
go look for a specific item, file, image etc.
A sample URL would be http://yanceyfamilygenealogy.org/vacoun1.jpg
A URL typically has at least three
sub components.
1) the http:// prefix which simply tells the computer the
format of communication that your browser must use to communicate with the
computer that contains the desired page or data. (Note that type
the “http” prefix is usually optional and assumed by the browser when not typed
in.
2) The string of characters that
represents the web site (or “domain” ) that is being accessed – which has
a very specific location identifier on the Internet
In this case
“yanceyfamilygenealogy.org”
In some cases the “web address will
be complete with just these first two items, in which case browser will display
a “home page” or “index page” to the user.
3) If however, what the user wants
to see is a very specific page or file on a specific web site the
specific file name will be added to the url with a forward slash seperating the
two.
In our case
“yanceyfamilygenealogy.org” is the web site and the specific file
on that web site we want to look at happens to be a image file with the name
“vacoun1.jpg” – with the two entities divided by a forward slash
http://yanceyfamilygenealogy.org/vacoun1.jpg
Why is this important to know??
Because it is very helpful to understand how file and information are
logically organized into web sites and web pages on the Internet.
Website Search Restriction
After you understand the prior
bullet - - you may do a google search and find that a particular web page on a
particular web site was very helpful – and you wonder if there are additional
pages or additional images about the same thing on the same site – but you
don’t see an easy way to pull them all together into one listing.
GOOGLE allows you to restrict a
search to ONE specific web site. This can be very helpful in specific
cases.
Lets say you wanted to see various
Yancey obituaries just from one particular site.
After you type in your Google
search – you can add a suffix that tells it to restrict the search to a
specific site
Example: YANCEY site:legacy.com
For even more Google tips – visit
this page
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/technology/20-tips-use-google-search-efficiently.html
You may be surprised that google
can even do complex math
OR typei in GOOGLE TRANSLATE
