How to use Google

What is Google?
Why use Google?
Choosing the best search terms in Google: advanced searching
Page ranking in Google
Google toolbar
Other Google products: Google Scholar and Google Books
More about Google

1. What is Google?

The best know Google service is a free to use search engine containing millions of references and links to material that can be found on the Internet. The information sources it searches cover all kinds of online literature, commercial websites, academic research, news items, as well as lots of personal web sites.

Other Google services include Google Books (printed books) and Google Scholar (for journal articles and other academic papers)

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2. Why use Google?

What's in Google?: Google is the biggest search engine database in the world: it currently claims to monitor 8 billion web pages. It uses spidering software to automatically crawl the web and find sites for inclusion in the Google index.

What search features does it offer?

Ranking: it uses a ranking system (what is this) to sort results that may help you find suitable items quickly if your search terms are relatively specific

Upper or lower case?: Google is NOT case sensitive

Word variations: Google uses stemming technology. When appropriate, it will search not only for your search terms, but also for words that are similar, ie: vaccines / vaccinations

Spelling: it can correct your spelling mistakes - it suggests alternatives where it thinks there may be an error

Advanced search: it can be searched using broad terms or by using advanced search methods to narrow down your search strategy
Things to be aware of :

Google does not perform searches within some of websites. For example, for technical resaons it may now be able to access information held in some databases.

If you are including or excluding word and phrases, you have to make sure you use the plus +, minus - and "quotation marks" with care

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3. Choosing the best search terms in Google: using the advanced searching

The broader your search terms are, the more results you are likely to get. You may end up with thousands of vague results.

What next? If you have tried a search, got too many results or not got anything immediately useful, then try to refine your search criteria further.

For this, you can use the Advanced Search features on Google. The easiest way to do this is by using the Advanced Search page.

Alternatively, you can learn the special characters which Google uses to icontrol these seraches and type them directly into the normal search box. These include:

Phrases: you can put quotes around your search words in order to "look for an exact phrase"

Search results must include a word: If you definitely want a word included in your results, then use the + sign in your search to make sure. Place the + sign immediately next to the word you want included, with no gap : e.g. +sussex development studies

Google also ignores common words (such as "where" and "how"), in order to reduce irrelevant results: if you want these to be included use the + sign

Search results must not include a word: putting a minus sign ("-") in front of words takes out terms you may want to avoid. The search paul -mccartney will search for item about Paul but not Paul McCartney. Do not put a space between the minus sign and the word you are excluding

Synonym Search: If you want to search not only for your search term but also for its synonyms, place the tilde sign ("~") immediately in front of your search term

Other useful options found on the Advanced Search page include:

Domain: you can include or exclude items from a specific website

Language: opt to search for items in particular languages

Format: if you are just looking for items in aparticular format such as PDF , you can choose this as an option

See these and other advanced search features explained on Google
(Search Tip: If you've already tried a search in Google and got some results, click on Advanced Search and it will automatically carry your terms across to the Advanced Search box).

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4. Page ranking in Google

Page ranking is one of the defaults that cannot be turned off in Google and is not for sale. It works on a unique combination of factors, some of which are:

popularity - based on the number of links to a page and the importance of the pages that link
importance - traffic, quality of links
word proximity and occurrence in results

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5. Google Toolbar

Google Toolbar is a free feature that allows you to install a permanent Google search toolbar on to your browser. This means that when you open your browser (eg Internet Explorer) a search bar for Google will always automatically appear amongst your toolbars.

Why use it?

You can search Google straight away without having to open up the Google site.

By using the "current site" search option (found in the drop down list to the right of the toolbar search box) you can choose to limit your search to the particular website that you already have open on your browser. Why do this? Some sites do not have good search facilities, so you may well get better results searching the site via the Google Toolbar than via the search facility of the site itself.

Download and install Google Toolbar in your browser

Review of Google Toolbar