The Search
for Power
By David Shamah,
The
Let's see now. Not having been
born with blue blood, I don't qualify to run a kingdom or even a dukedom. I
could run for President, or even Prime Minister, but I like keeping my hands
clean. The PTA meetings around here feature a lot of yelling too political
for my taste. And the job of dog catcher is filled, I have just been informed.
So what's a megalomaniac to do?
Folks like me, for example who are control freaks need an outlet on which
to impose their will. They want to be in charge, to boss people around, to be
in everyone's business as much as possible.
Unfortunately for me, all the
good bossing people around type jobs are already taken. But I did find a good
substitute; if I can't run people's lives, I can manage their information and
find out all the deep, dark secrets they have buried in the recesses of the
Internet.
Finding out top secret
information, of course, is a challenge; but so is finding not too secret
information about a myriad of subjects! There are millions even billions of
Web sites out there, and it's almost impossible to know which one has the
information you seek. And some of the most useful information out there is
tucked in some obscure database that never makes it to the top of Google's rankings of sites.
Google is the most popular search engine by far,
with most users turning to it first for information after all, Google knows all, as the saying goes. But, although Google sometimes lists hundreds of thousands of pages with
elements of the information you seek, most users will never venture past the
second or third page of findings looking for the data they seek.
For Web masters, getting on those
top-listed pages is crucial. Google has a complicated
formula that it uses for those rankings, much of it seemingly having to do with
reciprocal hits from other sites (not just reciprocal links). The idea seems to
be that the most visited sites have the most useful information for users and
it's an idea that makes sense, to some extent. A whole industry, in fact has
sprung up, with the objective of showing Web masters how to get listed on those
top Google pages in a search. But just because a site
is popular doesnt mean it has what the data you seek.
Mining through the data Google presents in a simple search takes time, because you
can't always know what context your search word or phrase appears on the page.
If you've got a fast internet connection or powerful computer that can have
lots of browser Windows open at the same time, that helps speed things up somewhat
but you'll still spend time sorting out what Google
thinks you're looking for versus what you really are interested in seeing. And
then, of course, there are the databases that Google
may or may not list, but usually never on the top ranked pages, as well as
sites with useful information that dont rank high up in the listings.
So how do you uncover the nuggets
you seek as quickly and neatly as possible, minimizing the data you have to
wade through? Not to worry; we have ways of making your search easier, using
tools provided by Google, as well as other general
search sites as well as hundreds of specialized search engines that will list
information on specific subjects or industries, and even ways to get at useful
public databases that will help you do anything from find new customers to helping
you guess answers in crossword puzzles.
There are some Google tricks that are well known, and a slew of others not
so famous, that will help you get to the heart of the data. Searching for a
single word on a Web page is simple enough, but what if you're looking for a
phrase? If you put State of Israel into Google's
search bar, you'll get pages with all three words in separate places on the
page. To ensure you get the term "State of Israel," simply put the
phrase in quotes. And if you want to make sure the page includes two terms or
phrases like "State of Israel" and "Ariel Sharon"
simply put a plus sign between the two terms (as in "State of Israel"
+"Ariel Sharon"). And to keep
But Google
has a few other tricks up its sleeve. There is, of course, the Boolean search,
which utilizes "And," "Or," or "Not" in searches
(bipolar OR "manic depressive," bipolar AND "manic depressive).
You can mix and match the boolean searches using
parentheses, such as in this example:
Then there are the more esoteric Google commands. You might think that if your search term
appears in a Web site's title, it might be more on target for your needs; to
give that idea a try, use Google's intitle: syntax. You can also add other criteria to intitle, such as in this search: intitle:
Two other related syntaxes inurl: and site: - can further help narrow things down.
With inurl:, you can search for criteria on specific
sites, such as in this search: "Ariel Sharon" "Shimon
Peres" inurl:jpost, which will search for pages
in the Jpost.com domain that contain the phrase "Ariel Sharon"
without "Shimon Peres." The site: criteria does something similar,
but you must specify a top level domain (.com, .org, .net. etc.) in your
address as in site:beeswax.com, while inurl:beeswax will search beeswax.com, .net, etc.
If you need to search a site that
has lots of ads, links, etc., but want to filter all that stuff out, use intext: as your search criteria. Intext:
can be combined with other criteria, as well. A search like inurl:cnn intext:link will give
you all the pages with the word "link" as part of regular text. On
the other hand, if you specifically want to check links or more specifically,
links that connect to a site use the link: search criteria, as in link:www.jpost.com.
Other useful search criteria are inanchor: (which checks a Web site's link anchors, i.e.,
the text you click on get to a Web site), info: (which give you a way to get to
pages cached by Google for a site), filetype: (which will find specific file suffixes, like
.pdf or .jpg), and related: (which will find you other sites on the same
subject as the one you searched for). And there's even a tool to check for
cached pages by date daterange: - in which you can
check how pages changed between two dates (it only works with Julian calendar
dates, so you have to convert your Gregorian date to Julian format, which you
can do at the U.S. Naval Obervatory's Julian Calendar
Converter at http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/JulianDate.html).
So, Google,
as we have seen, can be a great deal more versatile and produce more accurate
results with less effort than the way most people use it. Google,
as a general search engine, carries under its umbrella sites of almost any
kind. But what if you only wanted to check information on one subject like
inline skating, for example? Well, in that case you could use one of the many
subject-specific search engines, like
ds@newzgeek.com