Google Search Engine: A Closer Look

Ahhhh…when all else fails GOOGLE IT! Right? Do you feel closer to your comfort zone now? We think that you do! If when the concept of the Internet comes to your mind, the first thing that you immediately associate it with is GOOGLE, then you are not as “Internet illiterate” as you may have thought to be.  

Google was created in the winter of 1998 by graduate students at Stanford University. Wow!   That is definitely too many years ago, but that does not mean that it is outdated, quite on the contrary, it is considered to be the largest of all the search engines, indexing over 4 billion pages on the Web. Yes! You heard right! It is indexing over 4 billion pages on the Web. Amazing, huh?

One of its primary goals has been to present a clean, attractive interface. This is a straightforward, easy-to-use engine that is noted for its highly relevant results. It returns pages based on the number of sites linking to them and how often they are visited, indicating their popularity. Google also saves the last copy of each page it visits under the "Cached" link. If you're seeking a page that no longer exists, you may still be able to find a copy of it at Google. 

You can call it the filing cabinet of the web!

 When searching for a specific Web site, try Google's "I'm feeling lucky" button on the main search page. It's very good at coming up with exactly what you're looking for. And if you are lucky, you will search no more!

SEARCHES IN:

• Own web database
• Google Directory, powered by Open Directory Project

DEFAULTS TO:

AND

SEARCH OPTIONS:

Main Search page

• Supports (+) and  (-) signs
• Supports double quotes (" ") for phrases
  (useful, even though Google automatically looks for terms in close proximity)
• Displays search options for images, video, news, maps, and more (the list is LONG!)
• Supports Boolean OR, typed in CAPS (for simple search statements only)
• Maintains a stop word list; does not search for stop words unless they are preceded with (+) sign (e.g., Road +to Perdition) or within a phrase enclosed in quotes 
• Displays, when relevant, latest news links above results list

Advanced Search page

• Supports Boolean type searching with the following phrases: "all of the words," "exact phrase," "at least one of the words," and "without the words"
• Provides option to limit results to different "occurrences" or fields, i.e., title, text, URL, links
• Provides option to limit results by language, file format, (e.g., PDF, Postscript, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Rich Text); date range, domain, and adult content, and pages not filtered by license
• Supports customized displays of results from 10-100 per page
• Provides links to "Page-Specific" pages, e.g., those that are similar to the page and pages that link to the page
• Provides links to "Topic-Specific" pages, e.g., Google Book Search (full-text access), Google Scholar (academic papers), Froogle (e-commerce), all things MAC (Apple Macintosh), BSD Unix, Linux, Microsoft, U.S. Government, and University websites

OTHER SEARCH OPTIONS AND FEATURES:

• Displays "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, which goes directly to top-ranked site in your query
• Provides link to cached page archives, showing copy of page from the last time Google indexed it
• Provides results from related pages clustered by indentation
• Processes both upper and lower case searches the same, resulting in the same number of hits
• Identifies sponsored links and displays them in pastel colored blocks