Internet search tips

by Dave Riches

Searching the internet can be a frustrating experience - how do you find what you want in the huge mass of web sites? A little bit of extra knowledge can improve your web searching accuracy and help you find web sites of interest more quickly.

Which search engine do I use?

The current search engine of choice is Google™.
It is fast, simple to use and covers a huge range of web pages. It indexes the internet by using a "crawler", an automated program that follows hyperlinks from page to page. Many other search engines are also powered by Google behind the scenes. Other popular search engines or directories such as Yahoo can be useful but for sheer size and search accuracy Google is hard to beat (at the moment anyway!).

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How do I use Google?

You need to narrow down your keywords to search accurately. To find a local web content provider, instead of 'web content' you would search for 'web content yourtown'. Similarly, 'writing email newsletters' would return more relevant results than just 'newsletters'.

In the example above you could also use quote marks around "web content" to tell Google to only find pages where these words are adjacent (this eliminates pages on spider webs, tables of contents and other off-topic pages). The use of quote marks can have a big impact on how relevant the search is in Google - use them liberally!

For localised searching, the 'site' command also has a big effect. Entering 'keyword1 keyword2 site:.au' will only return sites with Australian domains in the search results. If you use a localised version of Google, you can limit your search to your own country by checking the box that says 'pages from country'.

Finally, you usually don't need to search for URLs (e.g. www.domain.com). Just type them in the address bar of your browser. We have noticed people finding our site using the wrong domain name in searches by examining our server log files.

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Searching shortcuts

A great addition to your browser is the free Google toolbar. You will need Internet Explorer version 5 or later to install it. It adds a thin toolbar to your browser window so you can search Google more easily. The PageRank™ indicator (green strip) gives the page you are viewing a rating out of 10 for importance - sites that get 10 out of 10 include Adobe, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple Computers and Google itself!

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What is Google Groups?

Google Groups is a sub-section of the main site and searches the thousands of special interest internet newsgroups (and the messages posted to them - 700 million at last count). For computer and technology questions this is often the best source of information to start with. Problems with the internet or other software and hardware issues have usually been experienced by someone else and the solution posted to the group by another user. All sorts of information can be found in Google Groups and it is usually the best bet when you are having problems with something!

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Other Google points of interest

• Google is not case sensitive (all searches can be lowercase)
• Google can be slow to include new sites (up to 2 months on average)
• Google Images searches for pictures but can be a bit hit and miss
• Google Advanced Search is available for more accurate searching
• Google does not accept paid listings - incoming links to pages and keywords increase the rank of a page

Take the new Google Tour for a more comprehensive look at what else you can do with Google.

Google and PageRank are trademarks of Google Inc.