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To Google or not to Google |
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Written by Tony Phelps
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Thursday, 17 November 2005 |
One of the more recent new words added to many languages is the verb
“to google”, or go in search of something on the Internet. Finding the
information you want in the literally millions of websites can be
time-consuming and difficult, but there are things you can do to
improve your chances of a direct hit.
Firstly, it is important to realise that there are many different
search engines (as any website that searches other websites is known),
and some specialise in particular areas. Google, of course, is a
general-purpose search engine but did you know there is also a News
sub-section? Go to news.google.com and you can search any news-related
website for a phrase, for example to see if anyone with your name has
been in the news anywhere around the world. There is also
images.google.com, where you can seek images for a particular subject
for example ‘daffy duck’ pictures. You can go to froogle.com to find
companies that sell something you are looking for.
Besides Google, there are search engines such as Alta Vista
(altavista.com), My Excite (excite.com) and Yahoo! (yahoo.com). You can
even use a search engine that combines a whole bunch of search engines,
such as Dogpile (dogpile.com).
For more specialised searches, you might want to use Ask Jeeves
(askjeeves.com) where you can type in a question in natural language
(such as “what is the capital of India”) – the results are surprisingly
good. There are kids search engines, shopping search engines, and many
others. Go to Search Engine Watch (searchenginewatch.com) for a
comprehensive listing and categorisation.
One thing to bear in mind is that a great many of the search engines
are commercial businesses – they rely on advertising and ‘promotion’,
and some (such as Google) make a lot of money from it. But this also
means that they will put the links to their advertisers at the top of
the results page. Some make this obvious, some do not. Watch out too
for tricks such as displaying an exact match for your search eg. “The
Independent” and then linking that to a totally different website.
Finally, many of the search engines have an “Advanced Search” facility
of some sort. By default, you will arrive at a general-purpose webpage
where you type in your search words or phrase, and click ‘Search’.
However, if you go to the Advanced search page, you will be able to
restrict the results much more eg. select the language, how old, the
country of origin, and others. The Advanced search page will have a
Help file to explain all the options.
The Internet is a powerful, low-cost information source. Spend a bit of
time learning how to make the most of it, and how to efficiently find
answers or information, and you will be repaid many times over. Check
with training and education organisations, they may offer short
training courses, and if they don’t, ask them to set one up! |
