Have You Found What You’re Looking For?

In the course of being more mindful and asking better questions about the various aspects of our lives, we subsequently need to improve our ability to find the answers to those questions. The Internet has given us an amazing gift: the organized treasury of the world’s collective knowledge. But in order for us to make the most of this valuable resource, we need to be able to access it effectively.

The best way to accomplish this is to significantly increase our ability to use the major Internet search engines so that we can find exactly the information we’re looking for. And, given how big a body of knowledge the Internet now catalogs (Google says that the Web now has more than 30 trillion unique individual pages), the effective use of search techniques is even more critical.

The task of finding exactly what we’re looking for in this vast sea of data can be daunting. However, armed with specific search techniques, you can cut through that mountain in short order.

Search Engine Basics

First, let’s explore how search engines work. We’ll focus on Google as it’s currently the most popular search engine, but others, like Bing and Yahoo!, work in a similar fashion.

Google uses automated programs called spiders to search (or crawl) through websites and note how often keywords appear on any given web page.
It keeps an index of keywords and where it located them.
Google then ranks the sites using this data, which determines the order in which Google displays those results on its search results page.
This ranking is a proprietary algorithm called PageRank, which assigns a relevancy score to each web page Google has analyzed.
PageRank scores a web page by the frequency and location of keywords within the web page. Specifically, if a keyword appears once within the body of a page, a low score will be assigned for that keyword. In addition, the length of time the page has existed is important as well—the longer, the better.
Also important is the number of web pages that link to the page being ranked. For Google, this determines. So in essence, if a page is often referred to (or linked) back to by other people, its PageRank will be higher. In a way, it’s somewhat like a popularity contest.

So let’s take an example: 

You want to search for Jon Stewart. 

If you go to Google and type “Jon Stewart,” the Google engine will determine the web pages that may match “Jon Stewart.”
If the first web page contains “Jon” but not “Stewart,” and the second web page contains “Stewart” but not “Jon,” those two pages are out of the running.
If another web page has both “Jon” and “Stewart,” it will be considered.
Once Google has identified what documents are in the running, it determines how to rank those pages.
To do this, it uses PageRank along with 200 other factors (the Google secret sauce as they like to cal it) to make its decision. A key factor, of course, is how often the page is cited and linked to.

So now you know why various pages appear in a certain order when you do a  search on Google. Essentially, they are ranked in relevance by:

How many times your keywords are present on that page
How many links have been made back to that page by others (this indicates how often other people have found that page useful)
Other data that Google uses in order to estimate how relevant the page is to your search query

What this means to your search strategy is that in order to get the right information and have it appear as high as possible in your search, it’s critical to use the right keywords. And, as we’ll see, how you tell Google to use those keywords in the search makes a big difference.

How to Drive Google

We want to fine-tune how we construct our search query to maximize the chances that the most relevant results are found and shown as high as possible in the list. Otherwise, you might get back a million-plus documents, and the ones that could truly be helpful to you may be many pages down in the search results. In that case, if you persevere you may eventually find the answers you seek, but more often, you’ll tire of the search and give up. Or perhaps worse, you’ll make do with less than optimal information to answer your question.

In order to understand how to make our search more effective, let’s take an example and explore the different ways we could construct the search (which keywords along with which commands in Google to use) to fine-tune our search.

Say we would like to know the latest information on Global Warming.

We could just enter the words Global Warming into the Google Search Bar and see what comes up. From our earlier explanation of how Google looks at keywords, we know it will look for documents that have both the words Global and Warming someplace in the document. In addition, we know that Google will look at things such as relevance, links, and up to 200 other factors (the secret sauce). In other words, when you type in Global Warming, it will make a judgment that you’re looking for information on that phenomenon and try to give as much relevant information as possible in the search results it delivers to you.

For this particular search, you would get 183,000,000 web page results, and the top three would include the Wikipedia definition of Global Warming, New York Times articles on Global Warming, and a section on Global Warming on the National Geographic website.

Put it into action

Now, to get more targeted results, here are a few things to try:

[image error] Use Quotation marks to search for an Exact Phrase

We can type in “Global Warming” to tell Google that we want only search results that have the exact phrase “Global Warming.” If you were to type this into Google, you would see your search results go down to 66,900,000. Your first few results would be the same, but then you would start seeing some different results after that, including ones where the term is in the website name itself.

[image error] Get More Specific

The more specific we get with our keywords, the more we give Google to work with to get the best information for us. In this case, we could identify other terms for Global Warming, such as Climate Change, that may net us better results. By typing “Global Warming” “Climate Change” into Google, we now get approximately 94,000,000 results, and different pages appear in the top ten. The more keywords you provide Google, the better it will be at finding exactly what you want.

As an example, you could type in: “Impact of Global Warming on world Economic Activity” if that was your specific topic of interest.

[image error] Have Google look for Similar Words and Synonyms

A neat trick to take advantage of the speed and power of Google’s computing engine is to have it search for similar words to your keywords in order to capture as many relevant search results as possible.

So say that what you’re really interested in knowing is Why is Global Warming or Climate Change an issue? In this case you could type:

“Global Warming” “Climate Change” ~issue 

The “~” symbol placed in front of a word tells Google to find similar words to that word in the search. When you run this search, you now get approximately 23,400,000 pages in your results with again a different set of matches in your top ten.

You can also use the asterisk “*” to trigger Google to identify additional search terms that perhaps you aren’t familiar with regarding a word or phrase. If you place the “*” in between two words, Google will return pages with phrases containing your two keywords and another word in between. In our Global Warming example, you would type:

Global * Warming

With this search, one of your top results would be from a site covering “Global Greenhouse Warming.”

[image error] The “OR” command

Google, by default, will try to identify pages with all search terms listed (the AND command is automatically assumed for you in the search field—Climate AND Change, etc.). If, however, you have two phrases, and either one would meet your need, you can use the OR command:

“Climate Change” OR “Global Warming”

As you can see, what we’re doing is a process of first being as inclusive as possible in our search keywords—to ensure we capture all relevant data—and then becoming more specific in order to ensure that the most relevant items appear as high in our search results as possible.

[image error] Exclude words or phrases

When you run a search, the search engine displays the massive number of web pages that match your search criteria. As you follow these tips to get more advanced in your search capability, the goal is to reduce this number to only the pages that more closely match what you’re looking for.

The exclude command is one way to reduce the number of results by removing those that are less relevant. For example, when researching Global Warming, you may want to focus on learning about the causes of it rather than the costs involved. You would therefore type in the following:

“Global Warming” -~costs 

Or, you could fine-tune it even further by including some additional terms and commands:

“Global Warming” OR “Climate Change” -~costs

This way we’ve included any documents with Global Warming or Climate Change, and excluded any reference to costs or other terms similar to it.

We could get even more specific. Since we’re looking for causes, we could add that to our search string:

“Global Warming” OR “Climate Change” ~cause -~costs

Just by using what the techniques we have gone through will dramatically improve your search results.  In general the better you are at identifying what you are looking for and what key words would describe that item, the more successful you will be.  After, that, it becomes a matter of using particular commands and techniques to fine tune your search results to filter out the less relevant information so that you are seeing the most important items as high up on your search results as possible.

There is much more that you can do with Google and other search engines than we have covered here.  If you, would like to learn more, refer to Chapter Four, Mastering Internet Research to Find All the Answers, in my book Think Smarter in a Digitally Enabled World.

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If you want to gain more insight into the topics in this post, please see Think Smarter in a Digitally Enabled World: A 21st Century Life Manual for Amplifying Your Knowledge, Achieving Your Potential & Changing the World.   The book is about changing the world through mastering holistic systems thinking.  With massive technological change and globalization affecting almost every facet of our lives, the “Killer App” in the 21st century will be the ability to Continuously Learn and leverage our capability for Proactive Thought. With the Internet, we now have instantaneous access to the world’s collective knowledge – which grows exponentially every year.  Those who can access it, analyze it, make sense of it, organize it, and put it into action will deeply accelerate their personal and professional success.  It will require using a new set of thinking tools, fully harnessing our digital technologies and apps, understanding how to see the systemic interconnections in our daily lives, and learning to maximize the combination of our logical left brain and our intuitive, creative, and spiritual right brain.  The book gives the reader the tools, techniques, and strategies to accomplish this goal.

 

 

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