Conducting a Basic Search

One of the things that has made Google so popular is its ease of use. From the Spartan nature of the main Google search page to the ease-of-use of the search feature, a Google search is so effortless than just about anyone can do it, without a lot of effort or instruction.

Behind the simplicity, however, is a powerful search engine capable of providing highly refined results. That said, you have to know a little more than "query and enter" to gain benefit from all this power. Read on to learn more.

Navigating Google's Home Page

We'll start our examination of a basic Google search with Google's home page, located at www.google.com. Google's home page, shown in Figure 2.1, is almost shocking in its simplicity. Unlike what you find with Yahoo! and other web search portals, Google's home page has no category listings, no news headlines, no stock tickers, no weather reports, and no blatant advertisements. All you see is the Google logo, the search box, two search buttons (Google Search and I'm Feeling Lucky), and some links to additional search services. It's clean, it's simple, and it's fast.

Figure 2.1. Google's main search page.

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Entering Your Query

Initiating a basic search is incredibly easy. All you have to do is follow these steps:

That's all there is to it. Enter your query, click the Search button, and wait for the search results page to display.

Feeling Lucky?

Google is so sure of its capability to generate high-quality results that it puts an I'm Feeling Lucky button on its home page, right next to the Google Search button. Click this button and you skip the standard search results page and go directly (and blindly!) to the page that is the number-one match to your query. (Do I personally use the I'm Feeling Lucky button? Not often, I confessbecause I seldom want to see just a single result.)

How Google Displays Its Results

After you click the Google Search button, Google searches its index for all the web pages that match your query, and then displays the results on a search results page, like the one in Figure 2.2. We'll look at each part of this page separately:

Figure 2.2. A Google search results page.

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• Top links. These links take you to other specialized Google searchesWeb (the default Google search), Images (pictures only), Groups (Usenet newsgroup postings), News (current news headlines), Froogle (products for sale online), Local (local businesses), and More (other Google searches and services).

  Note

  Depending on your query, Google might also display a short list of image results before the first regular result.

  
  

• Search box. This is where you enter your search query.

• Search button. Click here, after you've entered your query, to initiate the search.

• Advanced Search. This links to Google's Advanced Search page, which you can use to conduct more sophisticated, more targeted searches.

• Preferences. Click this link to determine which language you want to use, how many results you want to display per page, and to turn on or off Google's SafeSearch content filtering (great for shielding children from inappropriate content).

  Tip

  Viewing a cached page is particularly valuable if, for some reason, the "live" version of the page is down or otherwise inaccessible. You can also use the cached page to examine recent changes to the page in question, as the cached page is likely a few days or weeks older than the current version of the page.

  
  

• Statistics bar. This bar displays how many results were returned for your query, and how long it took to display those results.

• OneBox specialized results. On some searches, Google will display a short list of specialized search resultsnews stories, maps, and the like. These are displayed before the main search results.

• Sponsored Links. These are links paid for by Google's advertisers. You should not confuse these links with the main search results; they may have only indirect relevance to your query.

• Page title. For each search result, Google displays the title of the page. The title is a clickable link; click it to view the linked-to page.

• Page excerpt. Below the page title is a short excerpt from the associated web page. This may be the first few sentences of text on the page, a summary of page contents, or something similar.

• URL. This is the full web address of the selected web page. It is not a clickable link; you have to click the page title to jump to the page.

• Size. The size (in kilobytes) of the selected page.

• Cached. Click this link to see the version of the page stored on Google's document servers. Note that the cached page may be slightly older than the current version of the page.

• Similar pages. These are pages that Google thinks have a lot in common with the listed page.

• Other relevant pages. In some instances, other relevant pages from the same site are listed (and indented) beneath the primary page listing.

Omitted Results

There's one other thing to watch for on the search results pagein particular, on the very last search results page. When you get to the last of the page listings, you're likely to see a message like that shown in Figure 2.3. This message tells you that Google has omitted some results that are similar to those already listed. In other words, Google is trying to simplify your life by not displaying what it feels are duplicate results.

Figure 2.3. Google sometimes omits duplicate results.

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In most cases, this is fine; you don't need to see results that essentially duplicate results you've already seen. But every now and then Google gets it wrong, and actually omits results that you might find useful. If you suspect this is the case, click the Repeat the Search with the Omitted Results Included link. This will repeat the search and display all results, even those that may (or may not) be duplicates.

Extending Your Search

For many searches, you can find what you want simply by clicking a few page titles on the first search results page. But you may want to see more resultswhich, of course, Google lets you do.

First things first. Don't assume that the only relevant results will appear on the first search results page. Some queries return literally thousands (if not millions) of matching pages, and even though the most relevant results are supposed to be listed first, it's possible to find much useful information buried deeper in the results. For this reason, make it a habit to at least browse a few pages deeper in the search results, which is easy enough to do by scrolling to the bottom of the search results page and clicking the Next link. You can also go directly to a specific page in the search results by clicking a page number, as shown in Figure 2.4. And if you want to view a page beyond the first ten listed, just click on the page 10 link and you'll see another 10 page numbers listed. Keep clicking to the right to view more and more pages of results.

Figure 2.4. The bottom of a typical search results page; click a page number to jump to that page of results.

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There's another useful feature to be found at the bottom of the search results page. The Search Within Results link lets you narrow your results by refining your query and applying the new search solely to the original results. Here's how it works:

Google now searches the existing results, using your new query. The new, refined results appear on a subsequent search results page.