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GETTING THE MOST FROM GOOGLE
When you need to conduct a search on the Internet, is "www.Google.com" your first stop? If so, you’re not alone. Google is the most widely visited search engine worldwide among English-speaking users and racks up 180 million searches in the United States each week, according to Internet statistics firm comScore Networks.

If you’ve never delved more deeply into Google than to type a word or two in the search box and hit the "Google Search" button, you’re missing out on the many other ways in which you can use the search engine to track down information online. Here are a few suggestions for harnessing some of the myriad search capabilities offered by Google beyond the basics.

For online street maps, instead of going to a dedicated map site and filling in numerous address fields, just type the entire address, separated by commas ("211 E. Chicago Avenue, Chicago, IL"), into the search box on the Google home page and hit the search button. At the top of the next page, you’ll find links directly to the pertinent maps on both Yahoo! Maps and MapQuest.

You often can find similar results by entering a telephone number into the search box. While the results are not as complete as a true reverse telephone directory lookup, you may be surprised at how much information you can find. If you’d like to have your own phone number removed from the Google directory, visit "www.google.com/help/pbremoval.html".

Are you looking for quick data on a stock or mutual fund in which you’re considering investing? Type the ticker symbol into Google and hit "Google Search." The next page will provide a link to the Yahoo! Finance summary page for the stock, showing recent prices and activity along with links to financials, historical price data, news and more.

With the 3 billion pages that Google says it indexes, a general search sometimes will return an overwhelming number of matches. To narrow down the results, choose the "Directory" tab on the main page. Here you will find a list of topical categories; select any one of them to search just in that area.

Another option for narrowing search results is to use the "Similar Pages" link that appears next to each search result. Following this link will cull from all the search returns only those that are closely related to the selected result.

If someone recommended a Web site to you but you can remember only part of the Web address, called the "uniform resource locator" or URL, try typing "allinurl:" in the Google search box followed by the words you can remember. This type of search will return sites whose URLs contain the specified words.

These tips only scratch the surface of what a dedicated searcher can do with Google. While they all are useful, don’t forget that the way you enter your search criteria may have the greatest impact on the effectiveness of your searches. Choosing the "Advanced Search" link will bring you to a search interface with many options for building your query. You also can rely on some old standbys: use quotation marks around a group of words to search for that exact phrase, a plus sign before words that must appear in results and a minus sign before words you don’t want to see in the matches.

Reported by Joe Hoyle, electronic media editor, "hoylej{at}ada.org".

This Article Full Text (PDF) Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Search for Related Content