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Chapter 1: Google 101

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If you've never used Google before, you're in luck: it's incredibly easy to run a simple search. But if you've been using Google since the day it debuted, and you've never tried an image search or clicked the "Similar pages" link, consider yourself part of the vast Underusers Club.

Google is appealing because it's so straightforward. But you can get a lot more out of the site by knowing your way around the unobvious details and using the less prominent features. This chapter guides you through basic search techniques, and helps you analyze search results in ways that would surprise many power users.

The Google home page (www.google.com) is as plain and friendly as Web pages get—loading quickly both for dial-uppers and broadband jockeys. As Figure 1-1 shows, it features tons of white space, a blank search box awaiting your command, two buttons, and a handful of links. What less could you want?

Google is about as hard to use as your refrigerator. To run a search, just follow this simple procedure:

1. Point your browser to www.google.com.
   In most browsers, you can even skip the "www" part and just type google.com in the address bar, and then press Enter.
   As shown in Figure 1-2, the address bar is the space at the top of the browser where you can type in a new URL. URL (pronounced "You Are El"), which stands for Uniform Resource Locator, is the unique electronic address assigned to every Web page, and it tells computers where to find that page on the Internet. A URL looks like this: http://www.missingmanuals.com, or sometimes just www.missingmanuals.com, or even missingmanuals.com. Google's URL is www.google.com. URLs are also known as Web addresses, and you'll see a lot of them as you surf around.
   

   Figure 1-1: The launch pad for a million dreams. In Windows browsers, if you click Make Google Your Homepage, Google automatically sets www.google.com as the site your browser opens to and the place it heads when you click your browser's Home button. (If Google is already your home page, or if you're using a Mac, the Make Google Your Homepage link disappears.)

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The Heart of Google: Basic Text Searches

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The Google home page (www.google.com) is as plain and friendly as Web pages get—loading quickly both for dial-uppers and broadband jockeys. As Figure 1-1 shows, it features tons of white space, a blank search box awaiting your command, two buttons, and a handful of links. What less could you want?

Google is about as hard to use as your refrigerator. To run a search, just follow this simple procedure:

1. Point your browser to www.google.com.
   In most browsers, you can even skip the "www" part and just type google.com in the address bar, and then press Enter.
   As shown in Figure 1-2, the address bar is the space at the top of the browser where you can type in a new URL. URL (pronounced "You Are El"), which stands for Uniform Resource Locator, is the unique electronic address assigned to every Web page, and it tells computers where to find that page on the Internet. A URL looks like this: http://www.missingmanuals.com, or sometimes just www.missingmanuals.com, or even missingmanuals.com. Google's URL is www.google.com. URLs are also known as Web addresses, and you'll see a lot of them as you surf around.
   

   Figure 1-1: The launch pad for a million dreams. In Windows browsers, if you click Make Google Your Homepage, Google automatically sets www.google.com as the site your browser opens to and the place it heads when you click your browser's Home button. (If Google is already your home page, or if you're using a Mac, the Make Google Your Homepage link disappears.)
   

   Figure 1-2: To move to a new Web page, highlight the current address (in most browsers, clicking once in the address bar does the trick), type your new URL right over the old one, and then press Enter. Your browser jumps to the new page.
   Once you've entered Google's address, its home page—shown in Figure 1-1— snaps to attention, with a blinking cursor in the blank search box, ready to receive your search words.
2. Type in the word or words you want to search for (up to ten of them), and then press Enter or click Google Search

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How to Get More out of Google

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What makes Google so amazing is that, more often than not, you get what you're looking for right away. Google figures out that the pages you're mostly likely to want are the pages other people link to most often.

Figure 1-3: These results are Web pages Google found that contain the words "dog," "biscuit," and "recipes."

"Google" is a cute name, but does it mean anything?

The thing that stands out most on the Google home page is the company's colorful signature. Which raises the question: Why does this search service sound like it's named after a Muppet?

In fact, "Google" is an adaptation of the word googol, which is the number 1 followed by one hundred zeroes, or 10¹⁰⁰, and brings to mind the stupendously large number of Web pages that it searches.

Incidentally, the word googol was coined around 1938 by the 9-year-old Milton Sirotta, the nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner.

In fact, the system's so reliable that Google offers an I'm Feeling Lucky button, described below, that takes you directly to the page that would appear at the top of your results.

Still, depending on what you're looking for, you may have a hard time finding what you want. And as the Web grows, you can easily get too many results. A search for dog biscuit recipes, for example, turns up more than 90,000 pages. How do you choose?

Filtering is the name of the game. To prevent an attack of Futile Search Frustration, a few simple techniques help ensure that no matter what you're looking for, you'll get to the stuff you really want—not just somewhere near it. Here's a handful of tricks to keep in mind.

Google is a smart Web site, but it can't read your mind. If you search for apple, Google doesn't know whether you're more interested in the fruit, the computer company, the Beatles label, New York City, the singer Fiona, or something else altogether. (In this case, Google guesses you want to find the computer company, because—thanks to the techie types who hang out online—many more sites link to Apple Computer than to other sites with the word "apple." For more on how Google judges relevance, see Section 3.2.1.)

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Two Important Google Quirks

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Much of the time, Google does what you expect. Quotes, "and" and "or," special symbols—they're all familiar from other search features you've probably used. But Google has two quirks worth noting: weird wildcards and a ten-word query limit.

A lot of search engines let you use wildcards. Wildcards are special symbols—usually an asterisk (*) but sometimes a question mark (?)—that you add to a word or phrase to indicate that you want the search to include variants of your query. The wildcard stands in for the possibilities. For example, it you're not sure whether the Culture Club singer was Boy George or Boy Gorge, you might search for Boy G* to see how other people have completed the word.

But Google doesn't let you include a wildcard as part of a word like that. Which, frankly, is a drag. (In programming circles, you may hear the partial-word wildcard referred to as stemming.)

Google does, however, offer full-word wildcards. While you can't insert an asterisk for part of a word, you can throw one into a phrase and have it substitute for a word. Thus, searching for "chicken with its * cut off" could find: "chicken with its head cut off," "chicken with its hair cut off," "chicken with its electricity cut off," and so on.

A single asterisk stands in for just one word. To set wildcards for more words, simply include more asterisks: "three * * mice" leads to "three blind fat mice," "three very tough mice," and so on.

The full-word wildcard isn't as useful as the partial-word wildcard. But it can come in handy for filling in the blanks and when your memory fails. For example, you've always wondered exactly what Debbie Harry was singing in the first line of "Heart of Glass." You think it might have been "Once I had a lung and it was a gas," but you're not sure. Maybe it was "Once I had a lunch and it was a gas." Type in "Once I had a * and it was a gas"; Google gives you 1,090 links suggesting the lyric is actually "Once I had a love…" In short, the asterisk combined with quote marks is good for finding quotations, song lyrics, poetry, and other phrases.

The full-word wildcard is also cool when you want the answer to a question. For example, if you're wondering how often Haley's comet appears, you can use the asterisk to stand in for your X factor by running this query:

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Interpreting Your Results

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Google search results are deceptively simple. Google lists the links from what it believes are most relevant to least relevant, and each link includes snippets of text from the page that included your search terms. Google uses a variety of factors to determine relevance; see Section 3.2.2 for an explanation.

Each link also includes detailed, useful information—provided you know how to read it. For example, the cache you see as part of most results lets you view slightly outdated versions of those pages, which sounds unappealing but can be a huge benefit when the grail you're looking for is on a page that somebody has altered or removed from the Web. (Section 1.4.1.4 tells all about using the cache feature.)

Results pages also sometimes contain sponsored links (that is, ads), spelling suggestions, links to news stories, and other stuff that can help you focus your search. Figure 1-6 points out the components.

Google underusers overlook the many parts of a result, but the details are worth knowing about. (Of course, not every result includes all the possible components.)

Interpreting your results is like conducting a basic search: you could spend your whole life never bothering to learn the details, but you'd be missing out on the true power of Google. And by knowing a few tricks, you can, over your life, shave years off your search time.

Figure 1-6: You can easily tell which links are your true, unpaid results: They appear along the left side of your window, and there are often a ton of them. The paid results (or, in common parlance, "ads") are always separate—along the top and/or right side—and they're labeled Sponsored Links.

The pages that Google found for you—as opposed to those that somebody paid to have you see—are usually the most important results. Here's how a listing breaks down (Figure 1-6 shows all the parts).

If you find the text in your Google results listing too small to read, squint no further: Your browser lets you adjust the text size. On a Mac, try ⌘-plus sign or ⌘-minus sign. On a Windows machine, try Ctrl+plus sign or Ctrl+minus sign, or use View → Text Size.

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When Not to Use Google

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Google this, Google that. Is it always the best search engine?

No. Here are some reasons to use other search sites:

• Google simply doesn't perform every search trick you might need. For example, Google doesn't cluster results. Clustering is a hugely useful feature in which a search engine groups results by topic, as shown in Figure 1-14. (Vivisimo.com is the clustering king.) Nor does Google allow partial-word wildcards (Section 1.3); try nearly any other search engine for that feature.
  

  Figure 1-14: A Vivisimo search for Donald groups the results into helpful categories like real estate, The Apprentice, books, and so on. This sort of clustering can help you home in on the info you're looking for, but Google doesn't provide any such feature.
• Many sites perform deeper, more specialized searches than Google. For example, to find a person's email address, you could try typing his or her name into Google. But if you get back random results with no clear email connection, you might try MetaSearchEmailAgent, or MESA, at http://mesa.rrzn.uni-hannover.de/. MESA simultaneously queries the major Web-based email search engines, like WhoWhere and Switchboard.
  Similarly, Google is a quick way to find out what an acronym stands for. Or it can return a morass of confusing and unrelated results. For example, when you search Google for "PDQ", you get links for cancer-related sites, printing, yachts, phones, and something called "Touch Free vehicle washes." Even if you narrow it down by trying "PDQ stands for," you still get links about printing, dental work, catamarans, and the Physician Data Query. Pretty Damn Quick shows up, but it's hard to tell how meaningful that is. Acronym Finder (www.acronymfinder.com), on the other hand, generates a tidy list of possibilities, with the most common at the top (Figure 1-15).
  

  Figure 1-15: Sometimes Google isn't the best place to do a search. When you want to find what an abbreviation stands for, Acronym Finder cuts through the BS.
• Some topic-specific directories are simply more fine-tuned than Google's regular full-text search

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Nine Very Cool Google Tricks

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Google has a handful of tricks up its sleeve. Here are nine special and useful things you can do with Google—several of which even search hounds tend to overlook.

When you can't remember what "sedulous" means, or you want to find out what a "wireless LAN" is, you don't have to bother opening the dictionary or calling your friendly neighborhood IT guy. Instead, Google can come to your rescue. Type define into the blank search box, followed by your term, like this:

	define sedulous

and then press Enter to have Google include a definition at the top of your search results. (The definitions come from Web sites Google tracks.)

If you want a list of definitions and no other results, type in define followed by a colon and your terms, with no spaces on either side of the colon, like this:

	define:wireless LAN

You can also get a list of definitions by typing your term into the Google Deskbar (described in Section 7.4) and pressing Ctrl+D (not available for the Mac). Alternatively, if you use Safari as your Web browser, you can type define: followed by your term in the Google search box (not available in Windows) to get the definitions for a word.

Google Definitions aren't just English-only, either. If you ask the site to define a multilingual word like "rouge," for example, and then click "all languages," you get definitions for what the word means in English, French, and German—all on the same results page.

If Google doesn't come up with a definition that helps you—or in rare cases, if it doesn't come up with one at all—try searching for your terms at www.OneLook.com, which aggregates definitions from nearly 1,000 dictionaries. That ought to do it.

This trick is extra cool: You can use the blank Google search box as a calculator. Just enter an equation, like 2+2, and then press Enter to have Google tell you 2+2=4. For multiplication, use the asterisk (*), like this: 2*3. For division, use the slash (/), like this: 10/3. You can also use the search box to perform unit conversions, like this: 5 kilometers in miles or how many teaspoons in a cup?

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A Final Tip: Googling Google

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If you find yourself staring at a Google feature you've never heard of before, or if you're wondering when Google introduced the calculator, or if you want to know about getting a job at the company, head to the bottom of the home page or any search results page and click About Google. The links there take you to all four corners of the Google universe—if you can figure out where to look. For example: Is the calculator under Web Search Features or Services & Tools?

Half the time, it's easier to simply Google Google. There's a blank search box on almost every page within About Google, usually labeled "Search our site" or "Find on this site." When you run a search (like a google job) you get a regular page of Google results, complete with handy snippets. It's a terrific timesaver—letting you learn within seconds that the place to send your résumé is www.google.com/jobs, for example. Too bad they don't make Google for your life.

Cheaters may never win, but cribbing with the Google Cheat Sheet (www.google.com/help/cheatsheet.html) provides a quick hit of instant gratification when you can't remember a particular Google command. The Cheat Sheet keeps essential Google information stashed on one simple Web page, including a quick recap of common Google search operators, calculator functions, and the URLs for other Google services.

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Chapter 2: Superior Searching

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Searching the Web is like panning for gold. There's a lot of dirt out there, and you need the right tools to get at the shiny nuggets. The previous chapter provided the sieve. But to become a real search jockey, you need tweezers. And forceps. And maybe a staple gun.

It may help to think of every search as a problem, and to bear in mind that different problems require different solutions. "How do I find out which Web sites link to mine?" needs a different approach than "I want to find sites about Miss Piggy—but only those in Urdu."

This chapter sets you up with an array of techniques that you can use to run different kinds of searches or get more specific results from any search. Because Google's preference settings can affect all of your results big time, this chapter covers them, too.

Software programs almost always let you change some settings, like the way Microsoft Word lets you choose the standard font or turn spell checking on and off. Google lets you set some preferences, too. Unlike Word and other programs that hang out on your hard drive, Google remembers your settings with a cookie, a tiny file that a Web site can place on your computer and communicate with.

You can reach Google's settings page by clicking Preferences on the home page or at the top of any results page. Figure 2-1 shows the Preferences page, from which Google lets you control five settings: interface language, search language, filtering, number of results, and which window the results appear in. You have to click Save Preferences to activate the new settings.

If you change your settings and return to Google only to find they didn't take, your browser could be set to reject cookies. Check your browser's security or privacy settings. In Internet Explorer, for example, choose Tools → Options and then click the Privacy tab. You can move the slider to change the intensity with which the program blocks cookies (anything below the highest setting works for Google). Or you can click Edit to specify a Web site from which you want to allow cookies—in this case, www.google.com.

Figure 2-1:

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Have It Your Way: Setting Preferences

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Software programs almost always let you change some settings, like the way Microsoft Word lets you choose the standard font or turn spell checking on and off. Google lets you set some preferences, too. Unlike Word and other programs that hang out on your hard drive, Google remembers your settings with a cookie, a tiny file that a Web site can place on your computer and communicate with.

You can reach Google's settings page by clicking Preferences on the home page or at the top of any results page. Figure 2-1 shows the Preferences page, from which Google lets you control five settings: interface language, search language, filtering, number of results, and which window the results appear in. You have to click Save Preferences to activate the new settings.

If you change your settings and return to Google only to find they didn't take, your browser could be set to reject cookies. Check your browser's security or privacy settings. In Internet Explorer, for example, choose Tools → Options and then click the Privacy tab. You can move the slider to change the intensity with which the program blocks cookies (anything below the highest setting works for Google). Or you can click Edit to specify a Web site from which you want to allow cookies—in this case, www.google.com.

Figure 2-1: The changes you make on Google's Preferences page affect every search you do. You can tweak the settings for individual searches on the Advanced Search form (Section 2.2) and other places described throughout this chapter.

The interface language controls the language Google uses to display tips and messages. Google sets itself to use English, but you can change it to anything from Afrikaans to Zulu. If you want to add some zing to your Google experience, try Bork, bork, bork! (the Swedish Chef), Elmer Fudd, or Hacker. For the less adventurous, Google provides Tamil and Scots Gaelic.

The search language is different from the interface language. Instead of affecting the way Google talks to you, the Search Language limits your results to pages that are written in the language you specify. Google assumes you want sites in any language, but if you'd prefer sites only in Finnish and Catalan, this is the place to say so. Just click the blank box next to a language.

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Advanced Search

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On every Web page it tracks, Google records a handful of things, including the URL, body text, links to other pages, files in particular formats, and other goodies (Chapter 1). A simple Google search tells you when those things exist on the pages in your results. But if you want to restrict your search using those nit-picking criteria—to find only PowerPoint presentations for the terms you're using, for example—you may feel lost.

Google's Advanced Search page can help you sort things out. You can get to it by clicking the Advanced Search link on Google's home page or at the top of any results page. Figure 2-2 shows the straightforward form.

Advanced Search can be a quick way to build a complex query. It's particularly handy when you want to run a multipart search—like one that looks for either Ren or Stimpy, but returns only results that are also in PDF format.

Figure 2-2: Google's Advanced Search lets you take a piece of fine-grit sandpaper to your search results, brushing away superfluous results to leave you with just the ones you want. (If you're familiar with database queries, this form probably looks familiar.)

Occasionally, multipart queries from Google's Advanced Search page simply don't work. If that happens to you, consider using special Google syntax (described in detail in Section 2.6), which is sometimes more flexible. For example, the keyword define, followed by a colon and another word (as in, define:vintner) tells Google to search for a definition of the second word (in this case, vintner). Other syntax features let you restrict your search by file type, language, and so on.

Section 2.2.1.1: Query words

At the top of the page, in the shaded gray section labeled "Find results," Google gives you four choices for how you would like it to treat your search terms. In order from top to bottom, these mimic the results you can get by using the operators AND, quote marks, OR, and the minus sign. The helpful thing here is that you can use these puppies in combination—which is nice when you want to do something like search for two phrases simultaneously, or search for one and exclude the other. Figure 2-3 shows one possibility.

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Advanced Search on Steroids

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Google provides a useful advanced search form, but you can also run more specific searches from Fagan Finder, a site that has no official relationship with Google (Figure 2-6). It works best from Internet Explorer (www.faganfinder.com/google.html), but an alternate version that works with other browsers is well worth a try, too (www.faganfinder.com/google2.html).

Figure 2-6: All of Fagan Finder's choices are existing Google features, but Fagan Finder presents them in combinations not available in one place on Google.

Fagan Finder has all the choices you can specify on Google's advanced search page—things like the type of file you want to find and the domain you'd like to restrict your search to. But unlike Google, Fagan Finder has put several other variables on the same page, letting you run a highly specialized search without using syntax or multiple searches. The extra choices include:

• A menu that lets you specify the type of Google search you want to run (it's above the Search button). For example, you can search Google's Directory, Groups, Images, News, Catalogs, Froogle, or a few other oddball Google types (the Alternate option lets you run your query on other search sites, like Yahoo). What makes Fagan Finder's system notable is that one page lets you run an advanced search in any of these special collections; on Google's site, each special collection has its own advanced search page, forcing you to recreate your search if you want to check in on several areas. And Google's advanced search pages don't include as many detailed choices as Fagan Finder's.
• A menu that lets you specify subsets of the Google search you want to run (it's above the Feeling Lucky button). For example, if you're searching the Web, you can choose to run your query through Google's keyboard shortcut page (choose "all-shortcuts") so you can navigate your results without a mouse. Or you can choose to search just Google's own site (handy if you're looking for help on a particular feature), or a bunch of other narrow slices of the Web. For each type of Google search, the subsets change (the Directory search, for instance, lists the categories you'd find on Google's main directory page), but note that not all searches have subsets (News, for instance, has none).

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Searching by Language and Country

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Google's Language Tools are a collection of features that let you fiddle with the language and location of your search. For example, you can limit an individual search to pages written in a particular language or pages from a country you specify. You can also translate text you type or entire Web pages. And you can try out a new interface language or run a search from a Google site in another country.

While Fagan Finder lets you do some fancy searching, it isn't the only site that has an alternate interface for Google's advanced search features. Another site, www.soople.com, provides a very straightforward set of search boxes for each of Google's special features. And like Fagan Finder, it gives you the same high-quality results you'd get from Google itself.

For example, on Soople under "Filter search for filetype," you can type in your search words and pick the type of document you'd like to search for: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Acrobat, for example. An added bonus is that in the title of each type of search, Soople includes a link called "explain," which opens a box that gives a clear description of that feature and how to use it.

Soople is easier to use than Google's advanced search or Fagan Finder, but it doesn't provide quite as many options in most cases. For example, Google can search for two more document types not mentioned on Soople (Adobe PostScript files and Rich Text Format files). And Fagan Finder lets you cross-examine Google in unique ways.

But Soople stands out for its calculator page, which you can get to from the main Soople page by clicking the Calculator link at the top, or by pointing your browser to www.soople.com/index.php?p=&sub=calculator. Google's built-in calculator function lets you do some really, really complex stuff, but you have to remember a bunch of weird symbols and phrases to use most of those features (explained at www.google.com/help/calculator.html).

Soople, on the other hand, lays out each function in its own easy-to-use search box. Want to know the square root or percentage of something? This is your stop. It's also handy for logarithms, trigonometric functions, and other geeky stuff.

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Searching by Town

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Being able to limit a search to sites from a particular country can help you filter out a lot of noise. But Google actually lets you limit searches to pages about a particular U.S. town—which is a total godsend. Whether you're looking for a neighborhood magician to perform at your cat's birthday party or for a bed-and-breakfast that takes pets in a town six states away, Google Local can be your online Yellow Pages.

In fact, Google Local is a hybrid of the Google index and standard phonebook data. When you include in your search an address with city and state or Zip code, Google cross-checks its index against various online Yellow Pages, giving you a batch of results from your specified area only. But because it incorporates its own relevance rankings, Google sometimes lists a place 10 miles away from you before a place only 2 miles away.

Still, it's a super-handy search tool, and you can use it to search for general things (Italian restaurants in Boise, ID) or a specific business (Fiesta Market in Sebastopol, CA).

You can run a Google Local search two ways:

• From the regular search box. Just type in your search terms plus city and state or Zip code. At the top of your search results, Google includes a few local links, signaled by a compass icon (Figure 2-9, top). If you click through those results, you'll wind up on a page that looks like the one shown at bottom in Figure 2-9.
  If your business is listed incorrectly or is missing altogether, shoot off a note to local-listings@google.com and give them the proper info.
• From the Google Local page at http://local.google.com/ . This page (Figure 2-10) is a handy way to use Google Local. When you run a search here, you get a full page of results listings, like the ones shown at bottom in Figure 2-9.
  If Google can't find you a business within 15 miles, it shows you a page with the choice to expand your search out 30 or 45 miles.

Figure 2-9: Top: A search for parking garage 90210 finds where you can safely leave your vintage Pinto in Beverly Hills. If you click the first link (the line that starts "Local results for…"), Google takes you to a full page of local listings (shown below).

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Getting Fancy with Syntax

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When you type in a query, you can add words known by the geek term syntax, also called operators, that tell Google something specific about the search you want to conduct. For example, the operator inurl tells Google to look just in URLs for your search terms. Operators are great for honing results, easy as pie, and are the primary uncharted territory of the Google Underusers Club. In some cases, syntax replicates the results you can get via Google's Advanced Search page, but it's often more specific, and it almost always saves you some clicking around.

To use any syntax, simply type the operator and a colon before each of your terms, and don't put spaces before or after the colon. For example, a search using the operator inurl (described in Section 2.6.4) should look like this:

	inurl:whammy

or:

	inurl:"double whammy"

or:

	inurl:double inurl:whammy

URLs never contain any spaces, like the one between "double" and "whammy," so if your query is inurl:"double whammy", Google automatically searches for variations like double-whammy; double.whammy; and double,whammy—all of which are perfectly kosher in URLese.

If you type in a space before or after the colon, though, Google can't read your query.

As explained in the Advanced Search section earlier in this chapter, titles are different from URLs, and they're handy to search when you want pages that really focus on your topic. To search titles, use the operator intitle, like this:

	intitle:file intitle:sharing

or:

	intitle:"file sharing"

The first example finds titles that contain both of your words. The second example finds titles that contain the exact phrase "file sharing."

A variation of this syntax, allintitle, finds pages that have all your keywords or phrases in the title, in any order. For example:

	allintitle:file sharing

finds titles that contain both file and sharing, without your having to put an operator before each word (as in intitle:file intitle:sharing).

If you try to mix allintitle with some other syntax and the search conks out, put intitle before each keyword or phrase (

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Mixing Syntax

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As noted above, some syntax operators work only on their own, while some play well with others. For the many you can combine, cleverly splicing them together can narrow your search results in the most satisfying manner. Although you'll probably have to experiment a lot to find out what works for your searches, the tips below can help, too.

If you find Google's syntax confusing to combine at first, stick with the Advanced Search page for now. Then, after performing an advanced search, take a look at the search box on your results pages, where Google has converted your query into syntax. This trick can help you learn which operators do what.

The most important rules to keep in mind are those dictating which syntax not to mix. For starters, a few operators don't get along with any of the others: allinurl, allintitle, allintext, allinanchor, and link. In addition, there are a few general principles of mixology described below.

Section 2.7.1.1: Canceling yourself out

Basic safety tip: Don't mix operators that cancel each other out. For example:

	site:bluefly.com –inurl:bluefly

tells Google that you want all your results to come from bluefly.com, but that the results shouldn't include the word "bluefly" in the URLs. As you'd expect, this search yields exactly zero results.

Section 2.7.1.2: Doubling up

You can also run into trouble by doubling up a single operator. This query:

	"trading spaces" site:com site:edu

might look like you're asking Google to give you results from either .com or .edu sites, but in fact, you're telling it that your results should come from sites that are simultaneously part of both domains. Unfortunately, there's no such thing as a URL like www.google.com.edu.

To get what you want, try this:

	"trading spaces" (site:edu OR site:com)

Section 2.7.1.3: Getting carried away

If you want to run a very narrow search, something like:

	intitle:curtains site:ebay.com inurl:funkyfresh

you're likely to get nothing in return. Instead, start with a broader search, like this:

	intitle:curtains site:ebay.com

and then narrow it down by searching within your results (Section 1.2.3).

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Anatomy of a Google URL

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As you've probably noticed, URLs are often long, complicated, and weird. You certainly don't have to become an expert in what goes into those addresses. Indeed, millions of people live happy lives never wondering why some URLs are eighteen characters and some are longer than Beowulf.

But after you've run a Google search, the URL in your browser bar contains some characters that you can change on the fly to refine a quest without taking a long trip to the Advanced Search page. Plus, once you can read URLese, you can fiddle with URLs to produce results you can't get any other way.

The URL for a Google results page can vary depending on the preferences you've set, but mostly, they look similar (see Section 2.1 for more on preferences). Say you run a search for the phrase "over the river"; your results URL should look something like Figure 2-13.

In the middle of a Google results URL, you can sometimes find num=, which tells you the number of search results Google gives you per page of results. You can temporarily change the number of results to anything from 1 to 100 simply by altering the number in the URL and then pressing Enter. Most of the time, search results are easiest to read when you've got 10, 20, or 30 per page (Section 2.1.2). But this trick is a quick way to amp up the number of results on a page for the rare times when you want to review a lot of them at once or compare results 1 and 100 on one page.

URLs have a few parts, each of which helps your Web browser find the right Web page. Take http://www.nytimes.com/pages/national/index.html, for example.

The first part, http, tells your computer to communicate with other computers using the hypertext transfer protocol, which is simply a way computers communicate when transmitting Web pages to each other. (Sometimes, this section appears as https; the "s" tells the computers that the transmission is secure.)

The second part, www.nytimes.com, is the address of the computer, known as a Web server, that hosts that site. The ".com" in a URL is what's known as an extension or

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Chapter 3: Googling Further: Images, News, Maps, and More

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Normally, when you run a Google search, you're asking Google to look for your search terms on any Web page it's tracked. But the Web can be sliced in many ways, and Google has created a bunch of alternative systems for helping you find things.

For example, when you want to find a picture of somebody, you could type in his or her name followed by a few file types used for images, like "Mick Jagger" jpeg gif, and hope for the best. Problem is, Google gives you any site that mentions Mr. Jagger and that has JPEG or GIF files—but not necessarily pictures of the thick-lipped star. You could be drowning in photos of Keith Richards for days before you get any search satisfaction. Better to use Google Images, a special search that finds only pictures.

But the fun doesn't end with images. Google News lets you search for and organize news stories. Google Maps helps you find addresses, directions, and businesses all over the country. The Google Directory gives you a way to find information by category rather than keyword. And Google Print lets you search inside books.

This chapter explains all these features, and the following two chapters cover a few other Google goodies: Groups, Answers, Froogle, and Catalogs. Figure 3-1 shows you where to find all of these services.

Knowing how to use Google's alternative searches can help you tap amazing resources most people overlook.

Figure 3-1: You can reach Google's alternative search services several ways. From the home page, click one of the links above the search box. Or, on the home page, click More to get the page of service options shown here. You can also run a regular search and then, from your results page, have Google run the same search in a different service by clicking the appropriate link above the search box. Finally, the Google toolbar (Chapter 6) has buttons for each of the search services.

Google's primary search looks for text on the Web matching your keywords. But Google also lets you search through a bank of billions of images on the Web. Because most pictures have keywords associated with them, you can type in text to find them. (To figure out what a picture contains, Google reads the text on the page around it, the caption if there is one, and other variables, producing surprisingly accurate results.)

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Google Images

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Google's primary search looks for text on the Web matching your keywords. But Google also lets you search through a bank of billions of images on the Web. Because most pictures have keywords associated with them, you can type in text to find them. (To figure out what a picture contains, Google reads the text on the page around it, the caption if there is one, and other variables, producing surprisingly accurate results.)

The Image Search is terrifically useful when you want to find drawings or photos for use on your Web site, or for inspiration or imitation in your own artwork. It's even a good way to find things like desktop icons, maps, and posters. It can help you figure out if that familiar looking guy on the Stairmaster next to you at the gym was actually Benicio del Toro, and it can show you instantly what a Smart Car looks like. It can also be handy if you're a collector: The objects you're interested in may well be featured in pictures on Web pages. Figure 3-2 shows how image searching works.

Figure 3-2: Top: The Google Images search page (http://images.google.com) looks almost identical to the home page.
Middle: A search for "Elsie Borden" shows thumbnail pictures of the cow as well as memorabilia in her image. To view an image, click the thumbnail, and Google takes you to a page like the one below.
Bottom: The close-up page has two parts. At top, a version of the image floating alone; at bottom, the image on the page where Google found it, so you can see it in context.

If you have a Web site with pictures that you don't want Google to find, http://images.google.com/remove.html#images tells you how to remove the images from Google's orbit.

Google can legally help you find images on the Web, but its service doesn't give you the right to reuse the pictures. Many—perhaps most—pictures on the Web are protected by copyright, though the way you want to use them can determine whether you need permission.

First, the issue of copyright. If somebody creates a picture, they own the rights to it. In the same way you can't legally copy text—say, somebody's blog entry on the benefits of synthetic-fiber dog coats—and post it under your own name on your Web site or sell it to The New York Times op-ed page, you can't simply copy his picture of a dog coat and post or sell that, either. While many people believe that they can copy text or images as long as they

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Google News

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Most of Google's services help you find things on the Web only when you ask for them. Google News (http://news.google.com/) does the opposite: It goes out and finds news stories throughout the day, continuously updating its news page (Figure 3-5), or even sending you email as stories develop. Google culls articles from thousands of online news sources, and then presents them by topic ("Fans, Industry Mourn Johnny Cash") and by category (Entertainment).

Figure 3-5: Google organizes news stories into eight categories: Top Stories, World, U.S., Business, Sci/Tech, Sports, Entertainment, and Health. The first section of the page has a smattering of top stories, but if you scroll down, you can find three recent stories in each category, plus three more top stories at the very bottom of the page. If you don't like this arrangement, you can shake things up and move sections around—or even add your own topics, as explained in Section 3.2.3.1.

Most of the time, browsers don't let you zoom in and out on images. But you might want to see the details of a picture up close, or pull back to view the whole thing, especially in pictures with large dimensions. Or you might just want to see what a picture looks like at a different size. The secret is the Print Preview feature, which opens a new window with your current Web page, and lets you zoom in and out. This trick works equally well in nearly all browsers, though it's hit-or-miss in Internet Explorer for the Mac (try using Safari instead).

The first step is to isolate the image you want to see on a page of its own, so you can zoom in and out on the picture only and not the rest of the gunk on the page. If you're looking at a picture on its native Web page, or looking at it as a thumbnail on a Google image search results page, right-click it (Control-click on the Mac) to pull up a contextual menu, and then select something like View Image or Open Image in New Window (or Open Link in New Window, or View Link in New Tab). If you found your picture via a Google image search and clicked the thumbnail on the results page to get the two-part page shown in Figure 3-4, simply click "See full-size image" to open the picture on its own page.

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Google Maps

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Online map sites are among the most useful services on the World Wide Web. With MapQuest, Yahoo Maps, and their ilk, you can quickly plot your driving trip from start to finish by typing in the two addresses—no matter where they are in the country. With a graphical map and step-by-step driving directions, it's a heck of a lot faster than schlepping down to AAA and picking up a marked-up TripTik before you hit the road.

Google Maps wasn't the first online map site, but in typical Google fashion, it's one of the fastest, easiest, and most versatile sites in the cartographic category. Unlike other map sites, Google Maps is dynamic and interactive. In other words, if you want to see the next few streets over from your house, you can just drag the map to pull the adjacent neighborhood into view, rather than having to wait for the whole page to refresh. No other free map service comes close.

You have your choice of views with Google Maps, too. You get the standard road and street grids, of course, but if you're feeling omniscient, you can switch to a satellite (that is, photographic) view of the same area with just one click. You can even get a "Hybrid" map that combines the two views, superimposing street maps on a satellite photo of your destination.

Even if you're not actually going anywhere, it's easy to lose yourself in Google Maps for hours, just wandering around and looking at close-ups of your neighbors' houses. You can even annotate your maps with the location of the nearest tapas bar in town—a stunt that, 20 years ago, would have required an actual map and thumbtack.

If you want to see a map of a certain location with Google Maps, browse on over to http://maps.google.com. You can zoom right in on the map of the United States and use your mouse to drag through until you find your town, but it's quicker to just type your address in the box at the top and then click the Search button (Figure 3-12). Google Maps presents you with a street diagram, complete with a little pushpin icon pointing to the address you provided. A comic-book-style balloon displays your address and lets you get directions to or from the location.

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Google Directory

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When you run a good old-fashioned Google Web search, Google checks its massive index of Web pages and shows you every single one that has your search terms on it. That Web index, described in Section 8.3, is created by software that regularly combs the Web and records everything it finds; no humans judge or categorize the pages. The index system is great when you're searching the Web for something specific—like the name of the 1983 Wimbledon women's champ and how many errors she made that year.

But when you want to learn about something more general (like tennis) or you want to find out what kind of Web sites exist for a particular topic (like skincare tips), an index-based Web search can't give you an overview. You could, of course, type tennis or skincare into the Google search box in order to get a few thousand pages that mention those terms. But if you want a survey of a topic, the Google Directory (www.directory.google.com) is much more useful.

If the bird's-eye view of the U.S. in Google Maps Satellite view gets you all a-tingle, check out Google Earth (earth.google.com) for an even more exhilarating experience. Using 3-D technology, animation, and satellite imagery from all over the world, Google Earth lets you swoop in like Superman from outer space and zoom into maps so detailed that you can pick out specific buildings from just a few hundred feet above.

As with Google Maps, you can find nearby restaurants, hotels, and other places of interest, along with driving directions, for many cities in North America. With Google Earth, though, you can tilt and rotate the maps to see buildings and terrain in 3-D, and you can add your own annotations to points of interest for other Google Earth users to see. You can then print, email, or save the images from your virtual travels.

As its name suggests, Google Earth covers the earth, so you can travel the world in just a few clicks and keystrokes. Every place on the globe isn't here quite yet, but most major world cities are. For instance, type in Dublin, Ireland, and you soon find yourself hovering over the River Liffey, where you can float close enough to see the roof of the Custom House. Landmarks like the 44-meter-high column in Place Vendôme, Paris, or the docks of Hong Kong, are also visible. And as you type in a new address or city, Google Earth dramatically pulls back and whisks you over the expanse of continents, oceans, mountains, and whatever lies between your current and future location.

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Google Print

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As if you didn't have enough to read on the Web, Google Print can let you peek and search between the covers of thousands of actual books that have been scanned in and cataloged on its ever-expanding virtual shelves.

The works