untangling_the_web

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The Best Individual Google Hacks
While not the only useful and interesting Google hacks, these are among the most
valuable and less well-known techniques every serious searcher needs to know.
How Google Parses Queries. Google is sensitive to the number and order of query
terms. If you enter the query [windows explorer] without quotation marks, Google will
first try to find all the webpages that contain the phrase ["windows explorer"] Google
will search:
~ First, for keywords as one long phrase.
~ Second, for webpages containing all the keywords with the greatest
adjacency (closest together).
~ Third, for webpages containing all the keywords, regardless of where they
appear on the webpage.
Word Order Matters. Google gives more weight to the first term in a query, so put
the most important search term(s) first. Try these two queries and you'll see how
different the results are: [new york city] vs. [city york new]
Repetition, Repetition, Repetition. If you keep getting irrelevant hits, you can try
repeating a keyword that will be emphasized by Google, such as Uava coffee coffee
coffee], which cuts down considerably on the number of results about the
programming language.
Boilerplate Words or Phrases Yield Gold. Used in combination with keywords,
standardized words or phrases can produce very useful results from Google.
Whether it's "company proprietary," "not for distribution," or a copyright disclaimer,
these are the kinds of identifying query terms that searchers need to look for. Tara
Calishain sites the example of using "copyright * the new york times company" plus
keywords to locate not only articles at The New York Times website but those
reprinted elsewhere.
Disabling Word Stemming. The problem with Google's word stemming is that
Google does not give users the option to turn it off, which can frustrate users trying
to perform precise searches. However, if you put a plus (+) sign in front of a
term, this will disable word stemming.
Searching on Stop Words. There are two ways to force Google to search on stop
words such as the, a, an, I. The first is to include stop words in phrases enclosed
by doubte-quotes, e.g., ["to be or not to be"]. The second way to force Google to
search for stop words is to put a plus sign (+) in front of them, e.g., [+who +what
+when].
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