Search Engine Training ~Google~
October 22nd, 2008Needing to have a link on another one of my Blogs, it is now apropos to do a little look at ‘Search Engines’. Before Google there were many SEs and when Google appeared, I did not know how I did with out it. In fact even though we will start with it, I have to admit that this will give me a chance to go back and see how some of the others are working, they still vying for a piece of the action.
This training will not only give you a way to find things on the Internet, it will also allow you to have some understanding on SEO i.e. “Search Engine Optimization’ works.
(Remember To Read All The Way Through Before Starting This Project!)
OK Go to http://www.google.com/ 
and lets take a look! Pretty Simple ‘out the gate’, just type in a on or more word item you are looking for, e.g. Energy and then hit ‘enter’ or click on the ‘Google Search’ Button and at the top we are informed that there are about ‘499 million’ pages to choose from. Should this be your first time to Google or you have never fined-tuned it, you only have the first ten (10) on this view.
Now add another word so we now have, ‘Energy Medicine’ and it narrows it down to ‘25,400,000’ different pages. The more words you add the narrower it gets. Keep in mind that out of that 25+ mill, there will also be pages with only one word or the other. To get a better feel for what I just said, put those two words in Parenthesis so it looks like this: “Energy Medicine” and again hit enter. Now we are down to 346 K (345,000) pages, every page will have both words in it.
Before we continue with the search mode, lets dial in our GSE. (Google Search Engine) Before you do your first search, to the right of the ‘Search Box’ you will see ‘Advanced Search’, ‘Preferences’ and ‘Language Tools’. Now after the first search you will only see ‘Advanced Search’ and ‘Preferences’ to the right of the ‘Search’ Button. You can customize your search by clicking on Advanced Search, tho we are going to fine tune the default Preferences by clinking on … Yes … the word “preferences”. These settings will affect all uses of Google Programs, so keep this in mind as you experiment. And I do want you to experiment.
Leave all the defaults in place, except scroll down to ‘Number Of Results’ click on the display box, (10 is the Default.) and click on 100 (Results per Page.) and to the top or bottom to click on ‘Save Preferences’, which will bring you back to your search page. Now you will see the first 100 (In lieu of the default 10.) with out having to click on the next page at the bottom.
For you ‘Sharpies’ out there, wanting to know why I am being so explicit, read a prior post that explains why! i.e. CLICK HERE
Now that we have our two word ‘Search String’ in place within Parenthesis, we will fine tune it some more. Place a space after the last Parenthesis, then a + and with out any space we add a new search word to tighten it uo some more. Using ‘autism’ after the plus (+) we get it down to ’17,500’ meaning that many with the word ‘autism’ in them somewhere.
By removing the word yoga using a Minus Sign (-) e.g. –yoga after autism space we have eliminated over 10K pages. (7,2600) eliminating the word Reiki we have ‘”Energy Medicine” +autism -yoga -reiki’ now leaving ‘6,060’ thus cutting another 1K+ pages.
Next time we will look at some of the other SEs and see what they have to offer. Until then … Be Blessed, DP
