Part II: Crafting Queries and Using the Google Research Tools in .NET

Draw Quick Response Code in .NET Part II: Crafting Queries and Using the Google Research Tools

As you likely know, the basic way you use Google is to enter search terms, also called queries or keywords, into the Google search box, shown in Figure 4-1 Then click the Google Search button or press the Enter key on your keyboard There s no point in formulating your words as a question, even if you want a specific question answered For example, suppose the director of a science fiction thriller taking place in Antarctica asked you to find out whether there are ants in Antarctica (somehow the plot turns on the presence of these ants in a space training station on the polar ice fields) As a researcher using Google, it should be simple to answer the question:

However, the only words in this question, also called a query, that Google pays any attention to are ants and Antarctica So save yourself the trouble and don t bother with the whole question Just go ahead and type the important words, or keywords Google searches its index for Web pages containing both keywords (See 11 for an under-the-hood glimpse of how Google does its job)

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If you don t specify otherwise I explain how to do so in Introducing Simple Operators Google assumes that two or more keywords in a query are connected implicitly by the AND operator; Google searches for pages that contain all the keywords

When you use Google in its simplest form, you should follow some basic search rules: Punctuation doesn t count In fact, it is stripped out of the query automatically Keywords aren t case sensitive Uppercase and lowercase letters are considered equal, so Antarctica is the same as antarctica You re limited to ten words Everything after the first ten words is truncated and ignored (see Working with Wildcards for a way to get around the ten-word limitation) Avoid misspellings: If you misspell a keyword in your search, then you won t get the results you expect If Google thinks you ve misspelled a search term, it gives you the benefit of the doubt by searching for the misspelled word and proposing a spelling correction when it presents results Be specific: The more targeted your keywords, the more likely you are to get usable search results A search for sanitation Alameda County CA is more likely to yield results having to do with sanitation issues within Alameda County than a search for garbage Northern California A thing is not many things: Singular and plural forms are different keywords to Google If a search using a singular form (ant) doesn t provide the results you are looking for, you should consider using the plural form (ants) instead As an example, the query ant Antarctica doesn t tell you anything about whether there are ants in Antarctica, but ants Antarctica returns many pages that provide this information Google ignores most common, short words: Don t bother to pose questions in your search queries; Google throws out all the stop words anyway Stop words include most articles (such as the, and, and or), prepositions (after, in, and so on), pronouns (I), how, it, and forms of the verb to be (is, was, will be, and so on) Some single letters are also eliminated (If a word is omitted from your search terms on these grounds, a message to that effect appears at the top of your search results)

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These words are excluded to keep searches fast and to keep focused on the most important search terms in the query So if you want to search for the movie how the west was won, be sure to enter your query phrase wrapped in quotes ( how the west was won ) so that the stop words won t be ignored (although you ll still get some relevant results without the quotes while how, the, and was are ignored as stop words) Use keywords that are distinctive and important If you need to search using a stop word, you can wrap the phrase that includes the stop word in quotes, as I explain in Quoting Phrases, or wrap the stop word itself in quotes When stop words are excluded from a search, Google notes the fact on the results page, just below the search box In Understanding Results, later in this chapter, I explain how to analyze Google results in detail For now, you can see in Figure 4-2 the initial results for a search for ants Antarctica The Google search results include excerpts from the pages Google deems relevant This is very helpful to you as a researcher because you can scan these excerpts to decide for yourself how relevant a results page is without having to open the page