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How to find what the search engine's won't let you see You can pick up a much cheaper 'used' copy of this book at Amazon
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Searching Techniques (cont.)
Firstly, let’s look at a typical search phrase that someone might use to find my site: Free study guides for the CCNA certification (this is just one example picked out from my logs last month). This brought back, in Google, 67,100 results. The first thing to understand about this search phrase is the use of ‘stop words’. Words such as ‘for’ and ‘the’ will not be used by the search engine, so why use them in your search term? Far better to go for the phrase: Free ccna certification study guides But this too brought back 67,100 but that’s because the stop words were left out in both phrases, the first time by Google, the second time by the searcher. So what’s the point of leaving them out if Google is going to do it for you anyhow? Well, firstly getting into the habit of not using stop words is a good thing, and secondly, it helps for later on when you use other strings and operators to further narrow your results.
One thing to notice about these results, at least as far as Google is concerned, is that the top results are generally commercial sites and you aren’t likely to find too much free information on those sites (but of course there are always exceptions). You could jump straight from page 1 to page 7 and see what kind of sites you get there, but this method is leaving it to Lady Luck and is not very effective. Far better then to think outside the box and go searching for terms that are a little different and have the results you need brought to the top of page 1. To do that though we need some quick lessons in search strings and how to use them. 1/ Put groupings of words into parenthesis. When you search Google for free ccna study guides, you’ll get all pages that contain all of those words, but those words can be anywhere on the page like in the following paragraph: “Taking time out from my ccna study regime, I took the advice of one of the local tourist guides and took the free ferry over to the island” (ok, it’s a silly example, but you get the point). To make sure you only get pages that specifically offer free ccna study guides, then put your search in parenthesis like this: “free ccna study guides” Note
the " and ".
This will only return those pages that have that exact phrase on
the page with the words appearing next to each other and in that
order.
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The Extreme Searcher's Internet Handbook You can pick up a much cheaper 'used' copy of this book at Amazon |
