www.le.ac.uk

Beyond Google

October 2010

Katie FraserInformation LibrarianDavid Wilson Library

Outline

• How Google works

• Google tips and tricks

• Other search engines

• Other search types

• Resources for specific purposes

• Finding more

How Google search works

• Pagerank http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

• Google’s golden triangle http://eyetools.com/research_google_eyetracking_heatmap.html

Advanced Search

• Go to Google.com

• Use ‘Advanced search’

• Use ‘More search tools’

Google Shortcuts

• “david wilson library" - phrase

• -building – without ‘building’

• +geneus – exactly ‘geneus’ (not corrected)

• ~book - synonyms for ‘book’

• david * library – david ‘wildword’ library

Information within a website

• site:le.ac.uk - in the site (can add keywords)

• link:le.ac.uk - pages linking to the site

• cache:le.ac.uk - cached version of the site

• info:le.ac.uk - information about the site

• related:le.ac.uk - pages related to the site

Information within a webpage

• allinanchor:library - words in the anchor text

• allintitle:library - words in the site title

• inurl:library - words in the URL

Cool Google sites

• http://www.googlelabs.com/ - new applications developed by Google, sometimes including search

• http://www.google.com/experimental/ - experiments with Google search you can try out online

Other search engines

• www.bing.com

• www.yahoo.com

• www.ask.com

• www.exalead.com/search

• Try out the same search in each of these search engines and Google

• Which results come out at the top?

• Which look more useful?

Other search types

• Clustered search http://search.carrot2.org/stable/search

• Computational search www.wolframalpha.com

• Directory search www.dmoz.org

• Clustered search uses similar algorithms but presents results differently

• Computational and directory search use completely different systems

Metasearch

• http://www.langreiter.com/exec/yahoo-vs-google.html

• www.metacrawler.com

• www.dogpile.com

• Metasearch engines usually state which sources are used

• Can create a more reliable picture of relevance

Image search

• http://images.google.com/advanced_image_search

• http://www.flickr.com/search

• http://behold.cc

• Images on the internet are not free to use anyway

• Search for Creative Commons licensed materials

Academic search

• Google Scholar – ‘academic’ search results http://scholar.google.com/ which can be set up to search UoL resources

• Pinakes – list of quality educational web directories http://www.hw.ac.uk/libWWW/irn/pinakes/pinakes.html

Image search

• http://images.google.com/advanced_image_search

• http://www.flickr.com/search

• http://behold.cc

• Images on the internet are not free to use anyway

• Search for Creative Commons licensed materials

Social media search

• http://search.twitter.com/

• http://blogsearch.google.com/

• http://technorati.com/

• http://www.icerocket.com/

• http://addictomatic.com/

• http://collecta.com/

• Search social media for up-to-date ‘information’

• For example, is a website having problems?

Other cool stuff

• http://www.google.com/squared

• http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

• http://stilltasty.com/

Finding more

• http://googleblog.blogspot.com/ - Google’s blog, including updates on new services

• http://www.philb.com/ - Phil Bradley’s website. Try his ‘Which search engine when?’ guide http://www.philb.com/whichengine.htm

• http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/ - Search Engine Watch blog, looks at search news