Google: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

Chapter 1. Google 101

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 Heart of Google: Basic Text Searches

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 ...