Writers Using Google
As a writer I am constantly engaged in research, one of the first places I turn to is Google.
Like Google or hate Google it does supply a great deal of information; sometimes, I’ll agree, quite useless information, other times gems. one twi
Over the years I’ve come to know Google a little better and I’d like to share with you how I use Google to help me in my research.
If you are looking for information concerning an Irish author or maybe a Canadian author then don’t go to http://www.google.com go instead to http://www.google.ie for the Irish author or http://www.google.ca for the Canadian author. That will restrict your search to that individual country.
Google will search for web pages containing ALL words that you enter – the more words you use, the fewer, more relevant results you will get.
It does not matter whether you enter terms in upper or lower case – Google will ignore this.
To Google: Seamus Heaney, SEAMUS HEANEY, seamus heaney, or SeAmuS hEaNEy are all the same.
If you are searching for phrases, remember to place them in inverted commas, e.g. “I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible,” will give you 45 results with that exact Heaney quote.
Google does not search “stop words”, or extremely common words such as “and”, “the”, “to”, “a” etc.
If you want to search for a stop word, precede it with a “+”, e.g. +and. If the stop word is part of a phrase, it will be included as long as the phrase is within inverted commas, e.g. “I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.” Will include ‘for’ without the quotes it wouldn’t be included, but this time Google will return 9,970 search results
Using “I’m Feeling Lucky” rather than “Google Search” will automatically take you to the first page in the results list. In the case of the quote above nobileprize.org. This isn’t recommended unless you really are lucky but can be useful if you are working with a direct quote like in my example.
Sponsored links, the little ads you see down the right hand side of the Google home page and sometimes at the top of the results page can sometimes be pretty useful – but will rarely give you an exact match. Yet they are interesting.
Look at the URL (uniform resource locator, or web address) of a site to see what kind of site it is. For example, a “.com” will be a commercial site, a “.gov.uk” will be a UK government site, .edu wll be an education or university site.
Quite often when I look down my Google returns I’ll see a site that might be of interest. What I do then is copy the first part of the URL right up to the first slash and paste it into the address bar of my browser (incidently I use Firefox, it is much quicker than IE) and that will take me to the homepage of the site which will usually give me more general information about the site. I then make up my mind if it is going to be useful.
Go to advanced search where you can enter more details.
In advanced search clicking on “Similar pages” will conduct another search based on the keywords and links within the page in question. This is not as accurate as entering the keywords yourself, but will locate other pages of a similar nature that may have been missed in your original search.
In advanced search “with all of the words” box is the same as the basic Google search.
The “with the exact phrase” box is the same as entering a phrase in inverted commas in the basic Google search.
The “with at least one of the words” box will retrieve pages that contain one or more of the words that you enter. It is useful for searching words with similar meanings or synonyms, e.g. cancer neoplasms.
The “without the words” box will exclude words that you do not wish to occur in retrieved pages.
The Language pull-down menu allows you to restrict you results to pages written in the specified language.
If you are looking for a specific file format e.g. pdf then ‘File Format’ allows you to retrieve only results in that format.
The Date pull-down menu allows you to search for pages that have been updated in the past three, six or 12 months, useful if you are looking for news items.
The Occurrences pull-down menu enables you to choose where in the page you want your terms to appear, e.g. in the page’s title. Be wary of using this unless you are trying to locate a specific page that you have seen before.
The Domain box is a very useful feature that allows you to search for a particular kind of website, or even within a specific website. To search for a class of website, enter the last part of the URL. For example, to search for only NHS sites, enter “nhs.uk” or to search for only government sites, enter “gov.uk”. You can also search an individual site by entering more of the URL. For example, you could search the Department of Health website by entering “dh.gov.uk”. You can also exclude certain sites by changing the “Only” return results option to “Don’t” return results using the pull-down menu.
Basic search shortcuts and some other Google features
But rather than going to the Google Advance Search Box there is another option available, and the one I personally use.
Many of the options available in Google advanced search can be duplicated using “shortcuts” in the basic search, just as you might use inverted commas to duplicate the effect of the “exact phrase” box in the advanced search.
To search for “at least one of the words”, you can combine words with “OR”, e.g. writing competition OR writing contest. The OR must be in upper case, otherwise Google will treat it as a stop word.
To search “without the words”, you can exclude words by preceding them with a “–“, e.g. –poetry.
To search by Domain, you can enter the appropriate URL, preceding it with “site:”. For example, site: library.ac.uk would search for pages on academic library sites within the UK.
Search for dictionary definitions by entering a word or phrase, preceded by “define:”, for example define:murder. This is a very useful tool for writers
Writers constantly need to carry out research, these are a few of the tips I’ve picked up over the past number of years. If you have any you’d like to share then I’d be glad to hear from you.
