Patrick Crispin Advanced Googology

You can find all of Patrick’s session handouts at http://www.netsquirrel.com.

Here are some helpful hints for those who use Google and would like to perform better searches!

Google uses simple Algebra
How Google Works- use a phrase (the X’s)
Google measures adjacency (the Ys)
Google then measures the number of times your keywords appear on the page (the Zs)
Then throw away but the top 2,000
Multiplies each remaining page’s individual score by it’s “Pagerank”
And finally displays the top 1,000 in order

The importance of a Web page depends on the amount of hyperlinks to it. Get people to link to your page!!

When you do a search:
1. Be specific
2. Use Quotes to seach for phrases (Well not really!) It searches for phrases automatically
3. Use the + sign to require an exact match. (Not really!) searches automatically
4. Do use the -sign to exclude
5. Combine symbols as often as possible

Google’s Boolean Default is AND
You can use OR between words
To get a better OR statement put the words in parentheses

Google is not case sensitive!!!!! You will get all the same results.
Google now accepts up to 32 keywords. Unless you are trying to get students for plagiarism, stick to 10 words.
The order of your keywords does matter!

Google has special programs called spiders (aka spider bots) that searches for new pages. So when you search Google, you’re actually searching Google’s cache of Web pages.