Sunday, July 29, 2012

Get More Out of Google

During my school days whenever i used to read something new in my books , i always felt like going beyond my bookish terms and definitions and even today also i practice the same and certainly internet is the best means for that. For a naive researcher Google has become the preliminary source of information but yet surveys says that about 60-70 % of the people have to google more than once while searching. We will not count this as one of the cons of google as we still need know more about how to enhance our searching habits over web.


So here are few crucial tips for refining our Googling: 


1) Precise Your Query String :  Since Olympic games at London have bursted so i need to have a cover story particularly  from 2008 to 2012 by hindustantimes.com over this


site:hindustantimes.com ~event: "Olympics" +years 2000..2012


a) "site:" -> only searches the pages of that site.

b) "~" -> will search related words such as meet etc.

c) ' " " ' -> searches for the exact phrase not each of the words separately if given in pairs.


d) " + " or " - " -> used for including or excluding a particular word in search result.


e) ".." -> shows result within the result in designated year range.


Now lets say i need to find a pdf document over living habits of tortoises :


filetype:pdf living intitle:habits of *tortoises

a) "filetype" -> searches only for the type of file given e.g doc , txt , exe etc.

b) "intitle" -> only shows results with that word in the title(in our case its 'Habit') .

c) "*word"  -> replaces itself with the common word in your search.

Prefer not to ask questions from Google. Try to phrase what could be the answer of your query and use that as your search string.

2) Go for Google Scholar: For specific articles one could directly go for Google Scholar which not only leads you to the articles also the search results may show links to Google Books which you were planning to buy for your research.

author:leon data mining "alexis"


above query would result in articles over data mining written by alexis leon.

a) "author" -> name of the author.

b) "initials of author's name" -> for specific results you may put author's full name or initials in quotes.


3) Finding Out Definition : to find out the definition quickly simply use 'define:' before your word.

define:computer

4) Quick Calculations : you don't need to open calculator for minor calculations directly type your expression in the search bar.

(4/2)/5*6-1


5) Beyond Google : Google is not only the source of information. e.g JSTOR which publish content which you can't access for free elsewhere.

6) Mine Bibliographies : We all use Wikipedia when condcuting research . Its a great resource to familiarize one's self with a topic but a good researches should definitely check out the reference links at bottom for more credible sources.    





No comments:

Post a Comment