I n f o r m a t i o n Te c h n o l o g y

January 2009

Google like a pro

Google’s appetite for information is its strength, but for overwhelmed users
sifting through results can present a challenge. Many tools exist to help
tap Google’s higher-level indexing capabilities and make your queries more
efficient. Here are a few easy ones.

Birgit König

Diana M. Farrell, Eric S. Jensen, and Bob Kocher

Searching with Google can be a magical experience—in seconds, you tap vast
storehouses of information on servers in almost every part of the world. In
mid-2008, Google announced that its computers had indexed one trillion Web
files, so you’re likely to find things whose existence you never even suspected.

That’s also the challenge. If you want this amazing resource to find the
knowledge you need—and quickly—you must make your queries efficient by
learning some advanced searching techniques, whether you want a quick
overview of a topic, a fact to help you make a point, early evidence for an
out-of-the box hypothesis, or the time when your flight will depart. Many
guides to using the Google search engine are available on the Web; what I hope
to contribute here is a more user-friendly approach to doing Google searches,
as well as offering some suggestions on how to get the best from Google when
you are on the road.

What Google can—and can’t—do

While Google’s reach is vast, its computers can find only what is publicly
available on the Internet (for tips about finding information on the “invisible
Web,” see sidebar, “Google mysteries”). That excludes a universe of
information its owners don’t want you to see; often, they don’t even want you to
know it exists. What’s more, Google makes no claims about quality control: it
finds all sorts of so-called facts that have been taken out of context or wholly
fabricated. Yet there are tricks that can help you search for information from
more reliable sources.

Google mysteries

On the Google search page, how does the “I’m feeling lucky” button work?

When you click this button, Google takes you directly to the first search result, bypassing
the results page. If you are indeed lucky, you’ll see your perfect match, without other
search results and sponsored links.

Who decides which pages to list first?

Google uses an algorithm that ranks a page according to the number of times other pages
refer to it; a link from page A to page B is interpreted as a vote by A for B. In addition,
Google places more weight on votes cast by pages that themselves rate many links.

Can you manipulate your page rank?

Yes, in principle that’s easy to do, and sites try constantly. If you can persuade high-ranking
pages to link to yours, the algorithm automatically gives your page a higher rank. This has
inspired some sites to sell links from their high-ranking pages, which reduces the quality

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 of the search. Google tries to discourage the practice—for instance, by dropping the page
rank of sellers caught in the act.

Does Google access everything on the Web?

No. By some estimates, 500 times as much information resides in the “dark” (or
“invisible”) Web as in the “surface” one that Google and other search engines can
access. Sometimes sites and pages are hidden because the information in them is
proprietary—for instance, in sites that require registration or membership. Much of this
kind of information is located in the libraries of academic institutions, which are not open
to the “spidering” software that search engines use. Sometimes owners of Web sites
selectively hide pages from public search. To see the types of pages they’re hiding, type
/robots.txt behind the site address (for instance, whitehouse.gov/robots.txt ). This will
retrieve a list of hidden file names.

In a Google results list, I see a link that looks useful, but when I click on it, the page is gone.
What happened?

The page has probably changed and therefore no longer resides at its original address.
You can look for the old version in Google’s cache—a temporary storage area, in a
computer’s memory, that holds snapshots of Web pages in order to speed up access.
Place the command cache: in front of the URL to retrieve the latest cached version of the
site (Google will indicate when it was last cached). Your missing link might be there,
though, the busier the site, the less likely you are to find a cached page.

In general, the best way to find the information you want, without slogging
through pages of irrelevant listings, is to invoke Google’s higher-level indexing
capabilities. By fine-tuning your searches, you can save time and feel
reasonably sure that your investigation has been as thorough as a
do-it-yourself researcher can reasonably expect.

Making your queries efficient

The most common mistake is to assume that Google knows what you are
looking for when you enter general search terms. It doesn’t. Google’s
computers are amazingly thorough and fast. But in their most basic
mode—looking for a simple one-word search term—they aren’t terribly bright:
they seek any Web page that includes your word with a certain frequency, lies
within a specified proximity to the start of the file, or both. Single search terms
work well only for very specific, narrow topics.

Tip: Use minus signs and quotation marks

Two of the easiest ways to narrow your search are using the minus sign (to
avoid a nonrelated term) or quotation marks (to tell the search engine to look
for exactly what appears within the quotes). These operators are quite useful if
your search term has more than one meaning; Google has no way to intuit

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which one you’re looking for, as you will find when you read through the first
few wildly irrelevant hits. If you are looking for swimming pools and type in
pool, for example, you’ll find yourself wading through listings about billiards.
Fortunately, this is easy to remedy with the minus sign (-), which eliminates the
unwanted listings:

This approach may not narrow your search sufficiently: you’ll still get
pool.com, a Web site that auctions domain names. Here’s where quotation
marks help you specify the type of pool you seek. If you type the word
swimming and then the word pool without quotes, Google will list not only files
that have those two terms next to each other but also files that contain both of
them no matter how far apart they may be. Put quotation marks around
swimming pool, however, and it becomes the only search term, and Google will
find only pages where that combination appears. Quotation marks are
particularly useful when you are searching for an exact phrase. If you wanted
information about Bloomberg terminals, not Mayor Bloomberg or the
company Bloomberg LLC, for example, you could use quotation marks to
search for a phrase:

* As a result of changes in Web content, you may not get the same results for these examples.

Tip: Search for hidden keywords and titles

Do you still get several thousand hits? At this point, it’s important to
understand that Google indexes all those billions of Web pages by undertaking
a full-text search of every file and retrieving pages where your search term or
term combination appears. Google knows only that the words are there, not
whether they represent the actual content of the file; they may appear, for
example, in a passage about a marginal topic or only in a footnote.

To exclude irrelevant hits, you can introduce another filter into your search: the
keywords that the publisher of the page or third parties have added to generate
links to it. Keywords give search engines and other Web sites signals about the

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actual content of the page. To add this valuable information to your search, use
the allinanchor: syntax, which tells Google to search for your term among the
keywords that appear in what is called anchor text.

To make your search still more precise, you can restrict it to the Web page
title: a tag, similar to a news story’s headline, that a Web publisher creates to
provide a precise summary of the page’s contents. When you type intitle: before
your search term, Google looks only at the title tag. That’s as restrictive as a
search can be—you will get only pages whose authors included your search
term in the title, just for Google to find. This approach can be quite useful when
you look for very specific terms, such as the name of a particular product.

Tip: Choose your sources

Another way of improving the quality and efficiency of your results is to specify
the kinds of sources Google should search. You can do so either by conducting
your search through the Google subsites (for example, Google News, Google
Blogs, Google Scholar), which you can find on the Google toolbar, or by adding
a special syntax to your query after the search term. Here are some useful
filters:

site:edu for material from university sites

site:gov for government sites

site:us for US sites

site:org for nonprofits and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)

inurl:news for news sites

inurl:blog for blogs

inurl:forum for forum discussions

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For example:

Specifying the type of source you want can not only save you time by winnowing
the field of listings but also give you more confidence in the reliability of the
information.

Another filter tells Google what kind of file to find—filetype: followed by the
filename extension for programs such as Word (.doc), Excel (.xls), PowerPoint
(.ppt), and Adobe Acrobat (.pdf). This filter is especially useful if you are
looking for raw data, which are most likely to be found in formats such as
Excel spreadsheets.

Tip: Limit your search by time period

Time is another filter that can narrow your search, especially when you need
current information on a topic with a long history, such as Apple’s suit against
Microsoft. To restrict your search to recently updated sites, you can use the
syntax inurl:2008, which lists only links published in 2008. For instance:

Perhaps, however, you are interested in the history of the case, which involved
Microsoft’s use of the graphical user interface popularized by the Mac. Another
command—view:timeline—tells Google to determine how much information
about the case has been published over the years.

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Finally, to gain even greater precision, you can combine operators in your
commands:

How to find something you can’t specify

If only we knew exactly what we were looking for! Often we don’t, so we turn to
Google for a quick overview of a field rather than a specific bit of information
about it. In those situations, we typically know something, but not enough to
specify a good search term. Some of Google’s advanced operators come in
handy here.

When you have a keyword, for example, you can learn more by including its
synonyms in the search. No need to reach for your thesaurus: just type a tilde
(~) in front of the keyword, and Google will run a comprehensive search based
on the term and all its synonyms.

Another way of improving your odds in an open-ended search is to use the

related: command, which finds Web sites that contain similar information. Say
you’ve been searching for information at the CNN news site and want to find
others with similar material. You could type related:cnn.com, a command that
can also help you gain quick insights into which companies appear to be
competitors, given the similarity of their content.

If you feel adventurous, why not try the wild-card operator—*—essentially, a

fill-in-the-blank command.

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This command can save you lots of trouble. If someone drops a mystifying
reference into a conversation and it’s not appropriate to ask for an
explanation, jot down the term and type it into Google later. Say that you hear
a business associate talk about admiring Dominion, a company you don’t
know. Type Dominion is a *. You will quickly learn that it may be a Canadian
newspaper, a power company, a theme park, or a freight carrier. One of these
is almost certainly the company your associate admires.

Just the start

Google is much too complex to cover in a few pages, so the examples here
represent only a personal selection of useful commands. To learn more, try the
search term Google hacks, and you’ll find a wonderful selection of sites
dedicated to dissecting Google’s search syntax.

Google is the most popular search engine, but hardly the only one. Some
general-purpose competitors, such as Ask.com, display results in a different
format and automatically offer suggestions to narrow or broaden your search.
Metasearch engines, like dogpile.com, compile listings from a number of
search engines. Several search sites have some special twist: for instance,
Clusty, founded by Carnegie Mellon computer scientists, offers clusters of
related material. Mahalo.com’s index pages on topics can fine-tune your
search.

Vertical search engines specialize in particular industries or topics. These

sites—for instance, paperpundit.com (the paper industry), ides.com (plastics),
and pharmweb.net (pharmaceuticals)—find appropriate results quickly and
display listings that would typically be pages down in Google. When you step
beyond Google and try these other tools, you will typically find that you can use
commands similar to those for a Google search.

Tools for the road

Google continues to add handy features. For many common questions, it has
shortcuts that give you answers directly, without your having to click onto a
Web site that has the information. This feature is especially helpful when you
work from your BlackBerry.

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Let’s assume that you are about to fly from London to Frankfurt for a
conference and want to know whether your flight has been delayed. Just type in
the airline and flight number and then click on Search. In this example, we
typed Lufthansa 4743 and obtained the following information:

Arrival is in local time, of course. To calculate the flight time, you would need
to know the time difference. Google has that, too:

You plan to take a cab to the hotel, which the invitation says is about 35
kilometers from the airport, but you’ve never understood the metric system.
How many miles is that?

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German cab drivers rarely take credit cards, so you will have to get euros.
What’s the current conversion rate from the pound?

Having loaded up on euros at Heathrow, you think about the day ahead. You’ll
have time to kill before the conference starts, at noon. Maybe you can find that
anniversary gift and take in the sights of the old town. That all depends on the
weather, though. You can check the forecast for Frankfurt:

Google can also serve as a virtual calculator, which is especially nice if you find
the BlackBerry’s hard-to-maneuver and limited arithmetic functions
frustrating. Just type the term and click Search to get the result:

Useful notations include 2^5 and e^2 for exponents, sin(90) for trigonometry,
ln(10) for logarithms, pi for calculations involving circles, and 5! for factorials.
To find a complete list of math functions, plus links to other handy functions
(such as area code lists), go to google.com/help/features.html.
About the Author
Birgit König is a principal in McKinsey’s Berlin office.

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