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Presentation on search tricks and tips (mainly Google but also Topsy, facebook, twitter, YouTube) for Cork World Social Media Day 28 June 2012 Rubicon Centre CIT Cork
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Be#er searching
Imogen Ber0n
The science bit: how Google works
h#p://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNHR6IQJGZs
Congruence: matching your search • Do your search keywords appear in the page 0tle? • In the URL? • In the main text of the page? Are there also other related
words eg synonyms?
• Is the page good quality? How long’s it been there? Do other quality pages link to it? (Pagerank)
• Please go to Google.com and carry out a search – if you can’t think of anything try “swallow fledgling survival rate”.
What do the results mean?
The actual URL or web address is in green. Reading the end of the domain (eg .ie or .edu) can give useful info
The blue text is whatever the web designer entered as the page 0tle plus here the file type pdf The black text is called the “snippet” and is taken from the body of the page
You can choose what type of result eg pictures (images)
For scholarly documents you can see how many other people referenced it
Google advanced search • Does exactly what it says on the 0n… h#p://www.google.ie/
advanced_search
• If you want to find Ann followed by Brown and not all the Anns and all the Browns, put the search term in speech marks “Ann Brown”
This one is really useful. It allows you to search within a specific site. Excellent for public organisa0ons with useless websites and hopeless search features when you cannot find that vital form…
To exclude a word put – before it eg Shark –a#ack in the query box To include words with similar meanings put a 0lde ~ before it eg ~food If you want to use the func0on “or” (ie you don’t want pages with both search terms on) then it has to be in upper case eg swallow OR mar0n otherwise Google will ignore it. It may also ignore words like “and” or “in”
Your turn • Go to www.google.ie • Can you work out how you would use what’s on the previous
slide to search for reports about the elderly in Ireland that use another word for elderly? So words like elderly but not including elderly?
• If you cracked that one try going to Advanced search at h#p://www.google.ie/advanced_search and take the “Find pages that are similar to or link to a URL” op0on and read through that. The “related” operator is a great way to find similar sites when you didn’t quite get the page you wanted.
• Show your neighbour what you found and discuss…
Finding stuff again… • Go to h#p://www.google.com/history
• Sign in using your Google account if requested • Your browser also probably is storing all your web searches
too… If you know you looked for a par0cularly site on a par0cular day just click it on the calendar to find it again
• You can turn off the history recording… we’ll come back to personalisa0on and privacy later.
What Google and facebook hide… • Eli Pariser h#p://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzZzf6PoyC4
How to turn off personalisaCon
h#p://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2410479
• Maths: just type it into the search box!
– Eg what’s 96% of 300? Or try 20 miles convert to – It knows quite a lot of birthdays and birthplaces of celebs... To find a date of death put eg die Marilyn Monroe
• To find an email… use just the last part of the company website domain like this:
If that doesn’t work eg for senior people who avoid having their emails on public web pages, it’s worth adding filetype:pdf OR filetype:xls OR filetype:doc
• Example of a music search for Let it be: in0tle:"index.of" (mp3|mp4|wav) let.it.be -‐html -‐htm -‐php -‐asp -‐jsp
Maths, music and mail…!
Serious research… • Use scholar.google.com and books.google.com
• Use the “gearwheel” at the top right to alter your setngs and add any library links that you have access to:
• Excludes commercial sites – more manageable
• Includes cita0on counts to help understand which ar0cles are best regarded by peers
Your turn again…
• See the search worksheet
Other search engines • Wolfram Alpha is Google for Geeks h#p://www.wolframalpha.com
– The data is organised so it can be used for calcula0ons. Try putng in 33 grams of gold and see what it says…
– The basis of Apple’s Siri interpreta0on of natural language into queries – WA is ace at everything financial and scien0fic. If you type in a
crossword clue you can’t get but where you know some of the le#ers it can make a good stab at finding word matches
• Dogpile is a metasearch engine that looks at Google, Bing, and Yahoo simultaneously. It can be useful!
• Bing is about to update itself to include be#er social results. I find it so lame I have not included it today. If you want to remove it as your default search engine go here: h#p://www.pcworld.com/ar0cle/204718/get_rid_of_bing.html or to learn about it try here: h#ps://seogadget.co.uk/what-‐marketers-‐need-‐know-‐about-‐bing-‐2012/
Social search • Topsy is a search engine devoted to spotng men0ons on
social networks h#p://www.topsy.com – You can select which network – It allows very precise 0me horizons eg past 3 hours
Social search • Twi#er has its own advanced search feature: h#ps://
twi#er.com/#!/search-‐advanced – It’s very loca0onal so make sure you set the “near this place” op0on
correctly (distance) or it won’t find anything…
– If you need to search for a product or person or company regularly you can save your searches axer you have made them.
– “Twi#er people search surfaces results with preference to those users who have a complete name, username, and bio on their profile”.
– Just clicking on a #hashtag in a tweet automa0cally creates a search for other tweets using that tag.
– People who send a lot of spammy tweets eg entering contests will be “hidden” by twi#er search…
Social search • YouTube search: the key is to learn to use filter bu#on (under
the logo) and how to spot the irrelevant promoted videos (ads)…
Social search • For facebook search, type the name in the search box but
then click on “more results” and select People on the lex. This then gives you filters by loca0on, educa0on and workplace
Just for fun… • Irish airspace live radar h#p://www.flightradar24.com/
53.18,-‐5.68/8
• Type in any flight number to Google and it will give status • Of course, you know about Google Maps and Google
Translate?
• Google Alerts sent to your email can be very useful – set one up for your own name to be sure nothing strange is appearing about you on the web… h#p://www.google.com/alerts
Google Trends • Who else is searching a topic of interest?
• Find out “hot searches” (ie most popular) • h#p://www.google.com/trends
Thanks to Doreen O’Mahony of MediaManager for this one…
Bookmarking to keep track of sites • Pinboard h#p://pinboard.in/ (my personal favourite)
• Evernote h#p://evernote.com/ • Delicious h#p://delicious.com (not as good as it was)
• Google bookmarks h#ps://www.google.com/bookmarks/ • All these install a small app in your browser that allows you to
tag any interes0ng site and refind it easily
• To understand why bookmarking is useful watch this: h#p://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeBmvDpVbWc
Not sure about the webpage found? • Is the domain name appropriate? Some country domains
(.ie, .ca) are restricted – people have to prove they have a right to use them. Also .edu, .gov, .mil, .ac.uk – For .com, .net, .org, .net, .us, .uk they just buy them…
• Who published it? NY Times or a government website may be more reliable than eg Business Insider…
• Search the URL in alexa.com (site info for…) to discover • Who owns the domain
• Who links to the site (are they reputable?)
• Check what the site looked link in the past using Wayback Machine h#p://archive.org/web/web.php
Further reading… • New “power search” course free from Google starts July
10th… 6 x 50 minute sessions with a cer0ficate at the end. Register here: h#p://www.google.com/insidesearch/landing/powersearching.html
• University of California at Berkeley reference sheet (excellent but not very pre#y to read…) h#p://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/Googling_Max-‐Exercises.pdf
• Excellent examples of search problems and solu0ons: h#p://www.googleguide.com/solu0ons/
• These slides available from my slideshare.net account imogenber0n…