Google Mastery, Part 1: How to actually find what you’re looking for
February 23rd, 2006 by Chuck Sharp
Putting together an effective search query
When you search Google, you’re trying to find something, either a particular website, a kind of website, or some type of information. Basically, you’re asking google a question. Let’s look at the basic ideas behind asking good google questions.
When I search google, I stop for a second and ask myself what it really is that I want to find. This is the single most important thing. Get clear on what you’re looking for, and google can find it. Google can only search for what it’s told to search for. If I’m really looking for websites on nutrition and health for German Sheppard puppies, but I do a search for “German Sheppard,” I may not ever find what I’m looking for. When you can say or write out a sentence that describes your quest (so to speak), just ask one more time, “if I found that out, would that really answer my original question?” When you got it, you’ll probably know.
The next part is figuring out the best way to describe this to google. When you do a google search, the search takes the words you gave it and looks for pages with those words in them. Once it finds all the pages that have those words, it them sorts them by relevance and spits back the search results.
The two biggest things to realize are these: First, unless you enclose a phrase in quotes, ” “, google doesn’t care if the words are next to each other on the resulting pages. That means word order in a search query really doesn’t matter. Second, and this is really important, what you’re really searching for is what words actually are on the websites. In other words, if you search for [ articles on car safety ], you will only get search results of websites that have the words “articles,” “car,” and “safety” on them.
What this means is that you have to ask one or two questions to yourself to create a great query. The first is, “what would the information look like when I find it?” The second is, “how would other people refer to this information?” These questions put you in the position of the person that’s writing the web page that you are trying to find. It makes you think about how that author would talk about the subject matter and how he or she would title and create the web page.
With this thought, come up with as many ways of describing your query as possible. Take each part of the question you have and make a list of ways to describe each of those parts. Use different words, describe things in the positive sense and the negative sense (”save money” and “spend less money”), and again, think about how someone else might talk about it.
The last thing I do is to do multiple searches, and for every search result page I’d like to check out that seems relevant, I’ll load it into a firefox tabbed page by right-clicking the link to the page, and clicking on the menu choice that says “Open Link in New Tab.” That way, I can collect all the pages I want to go through, and then check them all out when I’m done searching. That’s just my personality wanting to keep parts of the process separate, you do whatever works for you.
Let’s look at an example. Say I’m planning a trip to Disneyland, and I’m looking for ideas to save money and sanity when at the happiest place on earth. First, I need to clarify my question. Well, I suppose it’s something like “How can I save money and time at Disneyland?” Ok, that’s good, but I can make it better. After all, what I really want to spend the least amount of money possible on this trip while still having a great time. How about: “What are some things I can do or avoid doing before or during my visit to Disneyland in order to spend the least amount of money without sacrificing any fun?” That’s pretty close.
Ok, now I want to think about how I might find this information. What would it look like? How would authors talk about this? Ok, here’s an off-the-top-of-my-head list: the search should have the word Disneyland in it, and then it might have “money saving” “spend less” “tips” “travel” “budget” “thrift” “managing cost” “save money” “family trip”, etc.
At this point I have several search query ideas. So, I head on over to google, and type in the original thought (it’s always ok to start simple): “Disneyland money saving”. Ok! The first few results are gold: MouseSavers.com, FamilyFun.go.com, and even epinions.com come up first. I load them up in their own tabs, and do search for “budget Disneyland trip”. Cool, found Mouseplanet.com, Disneyland Budget buster, and disneymouselinks. I’ve tabbed them, and now I’ll do my last search, “spend less Disneyland”. I found several more interesting links, and now, after opening all the tabbed pages from this search, I’ve got ten pages that are all about saving money at Disneyland!
Here’s a summary of my Google search process:
- Get clear on what you’re looking for. Make it precise, and make it a sentence.
- Take the parts of the question you have, and figure out different ways that information may be referred to on the web. Ask “How would this information look on the web?” and “How would an author refer to this information?” Make a list of phrases and keyword combinations.
- Do a google search for each of the good combinations you came up with.
- Pull up each relevant website in their own tab.
- Enjoy reading through the wealth of information you just found.
Technorati Tags: effective search, Google, Google search
Entry Filed under: PC Basics, Productivity
Trackback this post