The necessary information he is looking for such. Who seeks, he will find: the secrets of effective Google search

Surely you have heard more than once about such a wonderful search engine as Google. I suppose you have had to use it more than once when you wanted to know something. But did you find what you wanted? If you search Google as often as I do, I think you'll find this article useful because it's designed to make your search faster and more efficient. So, let's start with a little history...

Google is a corruption of the English word "googol", coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of the American mathematician Edward Kaiser, to denote a number consisting of one and one hundred zeros. Now the name Google is the leader of Internet search engines, developed by Google Inc.

Google holds more than 70% of the global market, which means that seven out of ten people on the web turn to its page in search of information on the Internet. It now registers about 50 million search queries daily and indexes more than 8 billion web pages. Google can find information in 101 languages. Google at the end of August 2004 consisted of 132 thousand machines located in different parts of the world.

Google uses an intelligent text analysis technique that allows you to search for important and at the same time relevant pages for your query. To do this, Google analyzes not only the page that matches the query, but also the pages that link to it, to determine the value of this page for the purposes of your query. In addition, Google prefers pages where the keywords you enter are close to each other.

The Google interface contains a rather complex query language that allows you to limit the scope of your search to certain domains, languages, file types, etc. Using some of the operators of this language allows you to make the process of finding the necessary information more flexible and accurate. Let's consider some of them.

Logical "AND" (AND):
By default, when writing query words separated by a space, Google looks for documents that contain all of the query words. This corresponds to the AND operator. Those. a space is equivalent to the AND operator.

For instance:
Cats dogs parrots zebras
Cats AND dogs AND parrots AND zebras
(both queries are the same)

Logical "OR" (OR):
It is written using the OR operator. Note that the OR operator must be written in capital letters. Relatively recently, it became possible to write a logical "OR" in the form of a vertical bar (|), similar to how it is done in Yandex. Used to search with multiple options for the required information.

For instance:
Dachshunds longhaired OR smoothhaired
Dachshunds, longhaired | smooth-haired
(both queries are the same)

Remember that Google queries are not case sensitive! Those. queries Greenland and Greenland will be exactly the same.

Plus operator (+):
There are situations when you need to force the inclusion of a word in the text that may have spelling variants. To do this, use the "+" operator before the required word. Let's say if we have a query for Home Alone I, the result of the query will be unnecessary information about "Home Alone II", "Home Alone III" and very little about "Home Alone I". If we have a query like Home Alone +I, the result will be information only about the movie "Home Alone I".

For instance:
Newspaper + Dawn
Bernoulli equation + math

Exclude words from the query. Logical "NOT" (-):
As you know, information garbage is often encountered when compiling a request. To remove it, the standard exception operators are used - the logical "NOT". In Google, such an operator is represented by a minus sign. Using this operator, you can exclude from the search results those pages that contain certain words in the text. Used like the "+" operator before the word to be excluded.

For instance:
Crane well-bird
Dead Souls - a novel

Search for an exact phrase (""):
Searching for the exact phrase in practice is required either to search for the text of a particular work, or to search for certain products or companies in which the name or part of the description is a consistently repeating phrase. To cope with such a task with the help of Google, you need to enclose the query in quotation marks (double quotation marks are meant, which are used, for example, to highlight direct speech).

For instance:
The work "Quiet Don"
“It was cold outside, although this did not prevent Boris from carrying out what was planned”

By the way, Google allows you to enter no more than 32 words in the query string!

Word truncation (*):
Sometimes it is required to search for information about a word combination of words in which one or more words are unknown. For these purposes, instead of unknown words, the "*" operator is used. Those. "*" - any word or group of words.

For instance:
Master and *
Leonardo * Vinci

cache statement:
The search engine stores the version of the text that is indexed by the search spider in a special store in a format called a cache. A cached version of a page can be retrieved if the original page is not available (for example, the server on which it is stored is down). The cached page is shown as it is stored in the search engine's database, and is accompanied by an inscription at the top of the page indicating that it is a cached page. It also contains information about when the cached version was created. On the page from the cache, the keywords of the query are highlighted, and each word is highlighted in its own color for the convenience of the user. You can create a query that will immediately issue a cached version of the page with a specific address: cache: page_address, where instead of “page_address” is the address of the page stored in the cache. If you want to find any information in the cached page, you need to write a request for this information after the page address, separated by a space.

For instance:
cache:www.bsd.com
cache:www.knights.ru tournaments

It must be remembered that there should not be a space between ":" and the page address!

filetype parator:
As you know, Google indexes not only html pages. If, for example, you need to find some information in a file type other than html, you can use the filetype operator, which allows you to search for information in a specific file type (html, pdf, doc, rtf ...).

For instance:
specification html filetype:pdf
Compositions filetype:rtf

info operator:
The info operator allows you to see the information that Google knows about this page.

For instance:
info: www.wiches.ru
info: www.food.healthy.com

site operator:
This operator limits the search to a specific domain or site. That is, if you make a request: marketing intelligence site: www.acfor-tc.ru, then the results will be obtained from pages containing the words "marketing" and "intelligence" on the site "acfor-tc.ru", and not in others parts of the Internet.

For instance:
Music site: www.music.su
Books site:en

link operator:
This operator allows you to see all pages that link to the page on which the request was made. For example, a query link:www.google.com will return pages that have links to google.com.

For instance:
link:www.ozone.com
Friends link:www.happylife.ru

allintitle operator:
If the query starts with the allintitle operator, which translates as "everything in the title", then Google will return texts in which all the words of the query are contained in the titles (inside the TITLE tag in HTML).

For instance:
allintitle: Free software
allintitle: Download music albums

title operator:
Shows pages where only the word immediately after the intitle statement is contained in the title, and all other query words can be anywhere in the text. Putting the intitle operator before each query word is equivalent to using the allintitle operator.

For instance:
Programs intitle: Download
intitle: Free intitle: download software

allinurl operator:
If the query begins with the allinurl operator, then the search is limited to those documents in which all query words are contained only in the page address, that is, in the url.

For instance:
allinurl:eng games
allinurl:books fantasy

inurl operator:
The word that is located directly adjacent to the inurl operator will be found only in the address of the Internet page, and the remaining words will be found anywhere in such a page.

For instance:
inurl:books download
inurl:games crack

related operator:
This operator describes pages that "look like" a particular page. For example, the query related:www.google.com will return pages with similar topics to Google.

For instance:
related: www.ozone.com
related:www.nnm.ru

define statement:
This operator acts as a kind of explanatory dictionary that allows you to quickly get the definition of the word that is entered after the operator.

For instance:
define: Kangaroo
define: Motherboard

Synonym search operator (~):
If you want to find texts containing not only your keywords, but also their synonyms, you can use the "~" operator before the word you want to find synonyms for.

For instance:
Types of ~metamorphoses
~Object Orientation

Range operator (..):
For those who have to work with numbers, Google has made it possible to search for ranges between numbers. In order to find all pages containing numbers in a certain range "from - to", it is necessary to put two points (..) between these extreme values, that is, the range operator.

For instance:
Buy book $100..$150
Population 1913..1935

Here are all the query language operators I know of on Google. I hope they somehow make it easier for you to find the information you need. In any case, I use them very often and I can say with confidence that when using them, I spend much less time searching than without them.

Good luck! And may the Force be with you.

Tags: search, operators, google

The problem of searching on the World Wide Web is not that there is little information, but that there is a lot of it. Searching for information on the Internet is the cornerstone of effective web browsing. Possession of search skills makes the Internet useful for the user both during work and during leisure.
To organize the search on the Internet, there are specialized services called search engines.

Search engines.

Search engines are a software and hardware complex with a web interface that provides the ability to search for information on the Internet.
Most search engines look for information on World Wide Web sites, but there are also systems that can look for files on FTP servers, items in online stores, and information on Usenet newsgroups. To search for information using a search engine, the user formulates a search query. At the request of the user, the search engine generates a page of search results. Such search results can combine different types of files, for example: web pages, images, audio files. Some search engines also pull data from databases and resource directories on the Internet.
The purpose of a search engine is to find documents that contain either keywords or words related to the keywords in some way. The search engine is better, the more documents relevant to the user's query, it will return. Search results can become worse due to the peculiarities of the algorithms. For example, for a request for pets, the Yandex search server (see more about it below) provides more than 14,000,000 links to pages that contain the information it needs. However, not everything is so smooth: when visiting some of the pages found, it turns out that the information they are looking for is not enough, or even not at all.
To search with maximum efficiency, you need to know how search engines work and correctly compose a request for information search.

Search engine principles

Search engines work by storing information about many web pages that they get from HTML pages. The main components of the search engine: search robot, indexer, search engine. Systems usually work in stages. First, the crawler gets the content, then it crawls the content of the websites. Only then does the indexer generate a searchable index. An indexer is a module that analyzes a page, after splitting it into parts, using its own lexical and morphological algorithms.
The work of most modern search engines is based on the citation index, which is calculated by the indexer as a result of analyzing links to the current page from other Internet pages. The more of them, the higher the citation index of the analyzed page, the higher this page will be displayed in the search results and the higher the page will be presented in the list of found resources.

Rules for constructing search queries

As already noted, there are many search engines on the Internet, domestic and foreign.
Russian search servers: Yandex (www.yandex.ru); Rambler (www.rambler.ru); Aport (www.aport.ru) and Gogo (www.gogo.ru).

Foreign search servers: Google ( www.google.com); Altavista (www.altavista.com) and Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com).
Russian servers are better suited for searching in Russian, foreign servers are better suited for searching in a foreign language, although Google does a good job of searching in many languages. Despite claims by many search engine owners that queries can be written in virtually the language people use to communicate with each other, this is far from the case. Thanks to the introduction of new language technologies, search engines have become much better at understanding the user. Search engines are now looking not only for the requested word, but also its word forms, which allows you to make search results more accurate. For example, if the search query contains the word smart, then its results will contain not only this word, but also its derivatives: smart, smart, as well as the mind and even the mind. Naturally, pages with word forms will not be among the first search results, but there are elements of artificial intelligence. This fact is useful to take into account when constructing search queries.
It should be remembered that search engines do not take into account the case of characters when processing a request, and it is not necessary to use punctuation marks in search queries, since they are also ignored by search servers. However, when building complex advanced queries, search results for which are usually much closer to what you expect, traditional punctuation marks are used. Most search engines can deal with typos. If it seems to the search server that there is a mistake or a typo in the word, it will warn about this with the same phrase: Perhaps you were looking for ....

Words to query the search server

There is an expression "The machine must work, the man must think," and it is said just about such a situation. The task of the user when compiling a search query is to highlight the keywords, the task of the search server is to process the entered query in the best possible way. Let's consider an example illustrating typical mistakes of novice users when searching the Internet. The search engine did not return useful results for the query "Mysteries about musical instruments". Then the user decides to correct the request by supplementing it and writing: “Riddles for children about musical instruments” - the search results turned out to be even worse than the previous one. For this example, a good solution was to search for the keyword "riddles". There are many such sites on the Internet, and by going to the site itself and searching a little through its sections, it is quite possible to find the information of interest. We formulate several rules for compiling queries:

• choose only the most important keywords related to the topic under consideration;
• words should not be too many, but not too few;
• in case of unsatisfactory search results, use more “soft” conditions for the query or try searching in another search engine, because search engine mechanisms are not the same, therefore, the results may also vary.

Advanced Search

To provide a more efficient search on the Internet, search engines provide the possibility of advanced search, as well as search using a query language. Advanced search - the ability to search with many different parameters. To do this, search engines provide separate pages on which you can set such parameters. The principles of advanced search are similar for most search engines.
Let's consider additional search options using the examples of Yandex and Google search engines, because Yandex is the most popular search engine on the Russian-speaking Internet, and Google is the most popular search engine in the world. When searching the Internet, Yandex was one of the first to take into account the morphology of the Russian language, that is, to use various forms of the word, as mentioned above. Having entered the site www.yandex.ru, the user can enter a query and immediately receive search results, or you can use the Advanced search link using the icon and go to the corresponding page (see the figure below), where you can fine-tune the search parameters.

Yandex advanced search page

Let's consider additional features that can be used on the advanced search page: indicate your own location (Moscow), indicate in what form the information should be presented (File type), the time period in which we are looking for information (per day, 2 weeks, per month, From ..Do), in what language the information should be presented (Russian, English More), and you can also specify the URL of the site, etc.
The choice (Exactly as in the query) is indicated to the search engine in order not to change the morphology of the query words, but to search only for the form of the word that is specified.

Query language

Query language is a command system that allows you to change query parameters from the main search string using special commands. Aimed at advanced users.
Since the query language is quite complex and voluminous, we present only its main constructions, which may be most in demand by users. Some commands of the Yandex query language are presented in the table.

The full structure of the Yandex query language can be found on the Help page (http://help.yandex.ru/search/?id=481939). The language of search queries in Google differs from Yandex, although there are some common points. Consider some of the basic commands of this language by examining the table (see below)

The full structure of the Google query language can be found on the Help page:

Google Chrome allows you to search on the Internet directly from the address bar at the top of the browser window (also called the "universal search box"). If you enter search terms in this line, it will automatically display search results from a search engine such as Google.

You can specify the search engine that the address bar will use by default.

Default search engine settings

Google Chrome's address bar defaults to Google search to display search results, but another search engine can also be used:

If the search engine you want is not listed, follow these steps to add it as a new search engine.

Adding, changing and removing search engines

The Google Chrome browser automatically saves a list of search engines that were encountered while browsing. For example, if you visit the page https://www.youtube.com, the browser will automatically detect and add the YouTube search engine to the list of search engines you can use. Therefore, you will be able to search YouTube directly from the address bar without even going to this site.

To manually add, edit or remove search engines in a browser, do the following:

Learn more about search engine settings

Below are some tips on the information you need to provide for each search engine.

• Adding a new search engine. Enter a label for the search engine.
• Keyword. Enter the text combination you want to use for this search engine. For quick access in the address bar to this search engine, use the keyword.
• URL. Enter the address of the search engine.

To find the corresponding web address, follow these steps:

1. Open the search engine you want to add.
2. Search.
3. Copy and paste the web address of the search results page into the URL field. Keep in mind that the URL of the search results page is different from the URL of the website. For example, you access Google at http://www.google.com, but you need to add the URL of the search results page, for example, http://www.google.com/search?q=XYZ if you searched for "xyz".
4. Replace the search term in the URL with %s . For example, for the Google search engine, the final search engine URL would be http://www.google.com/search?q=%s . When entering a search term in the address bar, %s will be automatically replaced with your search term.

Make sure you include %s in the URL. Otherwise, you will not be able to configure this search engine as default search engine.

If you are faced with a question that you cannot answer, what is the first thing you will do? That's right, refer to the web search! But which search engine will you entrust your request to, Yandex or Google? It is difficult to say unequivocally which of these search giants is better. It is believed that Yandex is more focused on commercial information, and is better suited for searching for information on the Russian-speaking Internet, while Google is more useful for informative and globalized search. Besides, in the absence of a better reason, for many it is just a matter of taste and established habit.

These days, search engines handle an incredible number of queries per day (Google alone manages more than three billion!), All thanks to the most complex algorithms that can match the words from your query with the information stored in the search engine database. But did you know that you can influence the work of these very algorithms in order to improve search results and find only accurate and relevant information every time?

These are a few additional characters that you can enter in the search bar to narrow down the search results. These methods of refining the search exist in both search engines, but the character sets are slightly different from each other. Whatever search engine you use, getting to know them will help you save time when searching for information on the Internet.

Your own operator

Operators are special characters or words that turn a normal query into a perfectly phrased one. The system recognizes them and "understands" what you are looking for. As an example, let's type some simple word in the search box, for example, "potato", and see what happens.

potato

A simple search query [potato] will give us basic information about this "species of tuberous herbaceous plant of the genus Nightshade". In addition, there will be pictures and an article from Wikipedia.

"potato"

If you put the query in quotation marks, then Google will search only those pages where it is used in the form you specified. The query can be single words, phrases or phrases. For example, [“from red potatoes”]. In general, this operator is indispensable if you need to find an exact quote, the name of a song, movie or group.

Potato

If you put a minus sign (-) in front of a query, the system will exclude it from the search results. Type the following combination: [soup recipe -potato], and Google will give you a bunch of soup recipes without potatoes. Keep in mind that there should not be a space between the word you want to exclude and the minus sign.

Add a link: statement before the web address you're interested in and you'll find all the pages that link to that site. Here and below, we use the eda.ru resource as an example.

potato site:eda.ru

The site: operator will help you find all the information you need on a single site or domain. Formulate a query and add site: in front of the web address. For example, recipes for fried potatoes on the site eda.ru should be searched like this: [fried potatoes site: eda.ru].

Do you need to find several sites or pages on a similar topic? By typing in the search box, you will find a lot of resources about cooking, recipes and everything related to it.

“Antoshka, Antoshka, let’s go dig*”

Forgot a word from a song or a phrase? Write what you remember, replace the missing word with an asterisk (*) and add quotation marks. Then Google will do everything itself.

potato OR tomato

If you add an OR operator between two search queries, the search results will show pages where at least one of the specified words occurs. Remove OR - and you will see pages where all the search terms appear together.

Want to see what the last saved version of the page you want looked like? Then insert the cache: statement before the web address in the search query. The page itself on the site may no longer be available, but Google will keep it in the archive.

The info: operator helps you find various information about the web address you are interested in: the saved version of the page, related pages, and all pages that link to your query.

Special characters for accurate results

Most punctuation marks are ignored by search engines, but there is a set of characters that can also change search queries and find more specific information for you:

& : The & character is used to search for closely related names and concepts. For example, a query using the words Petersburg & White Nights will give you all the information possible about this beautiful phenomenon of our northern capital.

% : Don't have a calculator handy, but you can't calculate in your mind a 55% discount on a shirt for 3500 rubles? Open Google and write directly in the line: . Yes, he can count too.