Goggle
SEARCHING HAS COME A LONG WAY DUDE: With Google around, it's next generation of searching - a combo of words, phrases and patterns. Photo: AP
WEB SEARCHING has come a long way. From times when the quest was largely `Infoseek,' and most horizons were to be found on `AltaVista,' or at best, it became smart enough for all of us to `Ask Jeeves,' or would Yahoo, we have as denizens travelled the equivalent web light years.
Today for everything we `Google,' and who knows tomorrow `Teoma' or `Clusty' would lead us to light.
Yet, most of us use search engines (SEs) by typing a word or two in the bar and click `search.' The rest is luck, our patience or tiredness levels, or the new speed. In the context of SEs, it's like using your mobile phone to only make or receive calls.
For greater search engine optimisation (SEO), each of us can use a few tricks to reduce our time in zooming on to the most relevant information.
How SEs work?
A primer on how SEs work would not harm along the way.
The earliest SEs would have web crawlers that read the metatags, which web creators would judge to define broadly the contents of a particular web page. So a college offering engineering courses would metatag words like engineering, mechanical, and say, India, Hyderabad, etc.
The problem with such an approach was metatag overlap - which means if a few millions of web pages have the word `engineering', and you used this word, it will give you as many results.
Google value add
Google introduced the next generation of searching, which combined words, phrases and patterns. If you put on the search string the following query `mechanical, electrical, electronic,' the engine not only searches for the words, but also figures out you are looking for engineering. If you type, `accounting, chartered accounting, courses, India,' it would know you are trying to finding CA and other related courses, preferably in India.
What we often miss?
Google then uses page rating mechanism to display results, to give you the most `popular' or `important' sites first. If you say typed management degrees - results on MBA would come before PG diploma courses, or if you asked for B-schools a Harvard would appear before say a Khairatabad-based MBA college. There are several features on the Google, and several other good SEs as alternatives, which we often don't use. At our own loss.
Image search: The biggest misconception is that only words can be searched on the Web through the SEs. Almost all good SEs today have image search. Move from the Google default setting of `Web' to `Images' and lo presto, you can even find how the labs in your prospective US university looks like.
Advanced search: This feature gives you greater options of putting more words into your search power. Choose between "All the words", "exact phrase", "at least one word", or "without the word" options to get more interesting, and often relevant pages.
The option `file format' helps you decide whether you are looking for HTML, ASP pages, which is more useful for the technically inclined. Using `domain' you can choose to have, or not have, a particular set of sites like .com, .org, .gov etc.
Using options like `Date of Updation', `Numeric Value', and `Language' - you are definitely streamline your search better.
An option I particularly like is `Occurrences', whereby you use a string, say, "Careers in Law", and then tell the search engine through this option whether you want pages where these words can be "anywhere on the page" or "title", "body text", "URL" or "Links" on the page.
Using `Page Specific Search', you can get similar results. Say you like the URL, `www.isb.edu' and type it, any page that is similar to this URL will be shown. Similarly, using a URL in `Page Specific Links', we can get all the pages that link to the URL we have typed.
Another thing you can find advised to do is set search engine filters to leave out a whole category of sites during either a specific round of search, or always, like say pornography, or movies, or violence, or terrorist sites etc.
Try reading `Advanced Searching Tips' page on Google or any other SE you use. It often gives you the latest on any new feature added.
Remember, the googles of the world are constantly adding newer features and no point waiting to learn about it months or year later.
Another is to best understand and paraphrase what you want, knowing the difference between `best college sites' and `best colleges' and `best courses' and `best careers'.
By Karri Sriram
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