Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Google and Beyond!

Any guesses on the world's favorite home page online?
No prizes for guessing..it is the good ol'(sorry new) Google. About 50 percent of Internet users are using Google as their primary search engine.

The huge and humongous world of Internet can be thought of as an ocean, with search engines as fishing boats. However fishing boats and nets cannot be really equipped to capture things that are lying deep. In other words, Google has access to about one billion documents worth of information (or junk!) that exist on the surface of Internet. But what about the 500 odd billion documents lying unvisited deep down? To delve deep, go to completeplanet.com.

Anything that has been posted online stays there. Those who say that the information has done a Houdini is wrong. There is always a way to retrieve online information that you think is no longer there.All you have to do is go to waybackmachine.org. This website has carefully archived every webpage since 1996. There is a heavy chance that you may find what you are looking for here.

We all need to do our bit with what we have got. And we have got Google! There is a lot of unwanted matter which comes on top of the search engine purely because of done to death key words. Every wannabe and web bee is trying to create and recreate something or the other on the web. In such a situation, how do you streamline your searching skills so that you get what you want without wasting time? Read on to know more..

Searching skills: Use the search engine to your advantage. You should know to seperate the wheat from the chaff. Let's say you want to find out information on the nutritive qualities of an apple. If you just type 'apple' on the Google search engine, you might just have to go to the doctor. There is a rightful amount of confusion in the search results page, as you get information on the iPod, Macintosh and Steve Jobs. A smarter way is to try this: type, apple-macintosh-mac-stevejobs+fruit. What the minus sign does is it tells the search engine to exclude pages that are irrelevant to what you are looking for . Rest assured, you will get information only about the fruit.

If you want to find out the meaning of a certain term, all you have to is type "define:" For example, if you want to find out the meaning of the word 'therapy,' all you have to do is type "define:therapy" in Google. If you are thinking of buying a cell phone which costs between Rs. 8000 and Rs.12000, go to Google and type: cellphone Rs. 8000..Rs.12000. The two dots show that you are interested in a product inside the given price range.

Lets say you are looking for information relating to sex education and all you get is porn. All you have to do is type : safe search-sex education and you will have no problems. There is a lot of information about search engine skills given in googleguide.com.