Washington - If you are like most people, you probably use Google for some or all of your online searches. Recent estimates put Google's share of the search market at anywhere from 70 to over 90 per cent, depending upon country.
But while you may use Google for your searches, you are probably not using it as effectively as you could. There's certainly no shame in that, however, for there are dozens of ways that Google allows you to target your searches, and no one can remember them all.
Read on to learn about a few.
Q: If a website does not have a search feature, is there some way that I can use Google to search for content only on one site?
A: Yes. Google keeps an index of pages on every site in its directory, and locating pages from just one site is easy, thanks to the "site:" prefix that you can use to precede a search term.
Let's say, for example, that you'd like to conduct a search for "windows 7" on Microsoft's site. To do so, go to Google, and type "site:microsoft.com windows 7," without the quotation marks, and press Enter.
Note that there is no space between "site:" and "microsoft.com" It's also not necessary to include the "www" before the domain name (microsoft.com). There is a space, however, between "microsoft.com" and your search term ("windows 7").
You'll find that all of the results returned from such a search come from the Microsoft.com website. This trick works regardless of which site you are searching.
You can also combine this with the well-known trick of enclosing your search term itself in quotation marks, which will force Google to return pages that contain the exact phrase in quotation marks. An example would be site:microsoft.com "download windows 7," which would result in pages on which the words "download windows 7" appear.
If you didn't enclose the words "download windows 7" in quotation marks, Google would return any page on which the words "download" and "windows" and "7" appear, regardless of the order in which they were written.
Q: I own a website and understand that I can improve my rankings by having other people link to me. Is there a way that I can find out who links to me currently?
A: Yes. "Inbound links" is the official term for what you are seeking. Inbound links are links to a particular site - in this case, yours - from other sites on the Internet.
Analysing inbound links is really the key to Google's search rankings.
In great part, Google determines which search results to favour by examining the quantity and quality of links that point to a particular site. The more frequently a site is linked to from other sites deemed to be of high quality by Google, the higher that site will appear in search results.
The search prefix "link:" will unveil all of the sites that link to you. For example, let's say you run the White House's Web site. To find all of the inbound links, you would type "link:whitehouse.gov," without the quotation marks, and press Enter. Google would return every page in its index that links to whitehouse.gov.
Do keep in mind that, for your purposes, the "quality" of inbound links is more important than the quantity of sites linking to you.
What determines "quality" in Google's eyes is a big topic, but essentially Google wants to weed out sites that attempt artificially to inflate their importance by manufacturing inbound links from sites of questionable value to internet users. Your search ranking can actually be harmed if a bunch of sites with little or no useful content link to you.
Q: Are internet searches on Google case sensitive?
A: Ordinarily, searches are not case sensitive on Google - or at least that's what Google's documentation claims. Numerous reports from web users, however, have found that at various times using capitalization in search terms did affect the search results.
There may be times, too, when the case of a search term does matter to you. Search for "amazon" (the desert), for instance, and you might want different results than if you searched for "Amazon," the online retailer.
If you do want to conduct a case-sensitive search on Google, try the "case sensitive Google search" site (http://case-sensitive- search.appspot.com).
Q: How can I force Google to return only recently published items? I often search for news items and do not wish to receive news from three years ago.
A: Google offers a little-known "daterange:" prefix that allows you to specify that the search engine should return results only from a particular date range.
There are a couple of caveats with this prefix, though. First, the date range must be expressed in Julian date format, which is nothing like the dates we normally type. Second, in Google's world, the date of a document has nothing to do with the actual creation date but rather with the date on which Google indexed the content.
Nevertheless, date range searches can be incredibly useful in helping you to narrow search results. The easiest way to perform such searches is not with Google itself but with Fagan Finder (http://www.faganfinder.com/engines/google.shtml), which provides an easier-to-use interface for supplying date ranges and querying Google for documents that fall within your date range. You'll probably want Fagan Finder in your bookmark list.
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