The Invsible Web

How to find what the search engine's won't let you see

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Searching Techniques (cont.)

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charge, fee, instruction, lessons, price, teaching, tutelage, tutoring

With all of these words now at our service we can now try various combinations of words and see what comes up in the results. Now I’m not suggesting that you need, or should, do this for every search you make, but it can certainly help when it comes to looking for obscure resources. After all, one extra hour of searching could mean the difference between enough good resources to pass your exam, versus failing by a percent or two. Remember this, that webmasters normally build their web pages to capture the searchers looking for the most popular phrases. If you type in the same thing that thousands of other people type in then you are more likely to get the commercially driven sites come to the top of your results because that’s what those webmasters were aiming for. If you type in seldom searched for phrases, you’re more likely to get the hidden gems where the webmasters either didn't know, or didn't care, about how to get their site to the top of the results.



6/ Using filetype endings in your search strings can bring in really good results. Personally I am of the opinion that search engines overstep the mark here by indexing non-web specific documents, but they do and that gives us an opportunity to find some really useful material. Most of the big search engines let you search for a particular type of document such as a Word document or a PowerPoint presentation etc. To do so you need to make a query along the lines of:

filetype:doc mcse
"ccna study guide" filetype:txt

It doesn’t matter in what order you put the keywords and the filetype, but the syntax of the filetype query must be filetype:xxx

Other filetypes that you can search for using this method include pdf, ppt, xls, doc, txt (you can also do it with .exe, but be careful with that one). Obviously, depending on what you’re searching for, certain types of file extensions will lead to certain types of files. For example, I’ve found the .txt files to be good for locating personal study notes (it’s what I use for all of my own notes also) but you need to be creative with using the kind of keywords in your search that the average Joe Public would name their files. One thing that I've found to be particularly useful is to search with the filetype command along with the number of the exam rather than the name. For example,

70-210 filetype:doc

7/ Google have a small range of specialised search engines so you can get to your information quicker and some of these are particularly useful for finding technical information for research and study, like:

Google Microsoft (this one is particularly useful because trying to navigate Microsoft’s site is like pulling teeth…)

Google Linux

Google Macintosh

Google BSD

Google Universities (sifting through this range of sites can be very useful for finding studying material.

Google UncleSam (I’m not sure you’ll find much in here, but I thought I’d list it just for the heck of it)



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The Extreme Searcher's Internet Handbook

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