Tips on finding information using search engines

Sure, there are no doubt classes you can take to learn this type of information. But this post is for those of us who haven’t taken them, didn’t pay attention when we were taking them and/or need a refresher. I’ll share a few tips which I use and perhaps others will leave helpful comments. Hopefully, these tips will help you improve the results you get when searching, and help you find what you are looking for more quickly and easily.

1.) Google isn’t everything-
Sure, it’s the best single non meta search engine around. But limiting oneself to that, when one can easily use a metasearch engine which improves on Google (I know of one so far, polymeta.com) is like tying one hand behind your back while searching. You may find that you don’t always agree with Google’s “relevance” for certain topics. Also, the other search engines pick up on things that Google misses, even outside of “certain topics”.

2.) tips for common words-
search engines are apparently now including common words which they used to neglect such as the, and, etc. However, most of the time when one is looking for such common words in a search one is looking for a specific phrase “this and that” “the little mermaid”, etc. so why not use quotes if one is going to include the very common words. Sure, you can find lots of results for a search of- and not or the – but will the most relevant results specific to what you are actually looking for pop up first?

Only two of the top ten results for searching (not in quotes) “and not or the” relate to Boolean searching or Boolean operators. In this case, if that is what one is searching for, one actually gets improved results by leaving off the extraneous the. On the other hand, searching the string (AND NOT OR the) (no quotes or parentheses) returns completely different results which are even less relevant to Boolean logic. Sometimes, it’s still better to leave out those common words, in other words, despite the fact that search engines will now search them.

3.) parentheses really help, but can be too specific-
Let’s take an example using a fairly common name, say Bob Jones, for example. Depending on the search engine you are using, putting quotes around “Bob Jones” will cut your results at least in half and sometimes by considerably more. The downside to this is that you’ll be missing out on anything which puts Bob’s last name first. Or calls him Robert or Mr. Or Bob A. Jones. Or Bob Arthur Jones. You get the idea. But if you are looking for someone very specific, you can include all of those possibilities. You just need to string them together with a whole lot of ORs. Which in this case will leave you with far too many results to be useful, but with a less common name can be helpful.
Quotation marks can also be especially helpful when one is searching for either a quoted passage or for a word pair or phrase- “now then” say, for example. Getting too specific on a not quite correctly remembered quote, on the other hand won’t be helpful or quick. So, use quotes, but know their limitations. Putting quotes around a single word, on the other hand, doesn’t do a whole lot. Yes, people do arrive at my blog via things like city “maps” of the wheel of time (hint- try searching “wheel of time” maps and/or look here) OR “kill the messenger” and “edmunds”, but I doubt the single words in quotes are helping much.

4.) Asking a search engine a specific question (or attempting to engage it in conversation) as one would a human being isn’t always the best approach. I’ll give you a specific example or two here:
I got two hits to this blog for the phrase (searched without quotes) “can i be fired for bebo comment” yesterday. I don’t know anything about bebo. If I had to guess, I’d say the answer is yes, depending on what one writes, who one works for, etc. But, I’d never written about or even read about Deena Pawson, who was indeed fired for writing Bebo comments “work sux” and working until midnight was “gay like the management”. Nonetheless, I ranked pretty well (second page) for that search because (I think) my blog has the word can in the title and I have a Bebo category for this blog. Admittedly, the single entry (so far) in that category is pretty relevant to the overall question; nonetheless it doesn’t address the fairly specific specific question asked, except perhaps in general terms- what you post on social networking sites can indeed get you fired, fined, suspended or be used in a court case against you.

Second example on search engine queries- (which just goes to show you, searchers may know something I don’t)
(no quotes) “how popular relatively is the movie zeit(geist)” (I’m assuming they finished the word zeitgeist). Personally, I’d have tried something like this: (“Zeitgeist the movie” popularity). Or (popularity Zeitgeist movie) or maybe (popular Zeitgeist movie). None of these return my blog on the front page, however, unlike the first query. And I think I did, to some degree give a fair answer to that question. And so far, I haven’t seen too many other places in the relevant results which do.
Peter Joseph’s site itself gave a figure of 70,000+/- views per day a few months back. Some say it claims the title of the most watched internet movie ever, though it’s a bit difficult to verify that claim, what with google censorship and all…

Anyway, I may add a few more search tips here when/as I think of them. Got some good ones of your own? Feel free to share them in a comment.

Peter Scheer- The Great Firewall

Peter Scheer wrote an interesting article awhile back called The Great Firewall, talking about the internet censorship in China. Parts of particular interest to me were what search engine terms were deemed verboten and the types of sites outside of China which get blocked, so I’ll quote those passages below.

A milestone of sorts was passed in the first quarter of this year when China blew past the United States to become the biggest internet market in the world. At 225 million users, and still growing at double-digit rates, China’s internet is a business opportunity so grand and irresistible that it can blind normally circumspect people to the moral compromises that cooperation with Chinese government authorities inevitably entails.

I experienced this first-hand when, about a year ago, I made inquiries at the China offices of a number of American law firms to ask for help in comparing internet search results for searches performed inside China–within the “Great Firewall” of government censorship, as it is called–with the same searches performed from locations outside China (and therefore outside the firewall). The law firms demurred, explaining, with commendable candor at least, that they could not risk being observed submitting to Google and Yahoo search terms like “Tiananmen Square” or “Falun Gong”.

Mind you, these were American-trained litigators, the kind of lawyers who barely flinch in the face of a grand jury subpoena, and who spend their careers pushing back against the demands of government authorities. While usually immune to intimidation, they nonetheless feared the repercussions to themselves, their firms, and their clients from the mere act of typing a few search terms into an internet-connected computer. So seductive are the business opportunities in China that the risk of losing them transforms even hardened litigators into wimps.

and the type of sites (which no doubt include this blog) which get blocked…

Websites based outside China, meanwhile, are subject to blocking by the Great Firewall based not on their content, but on their capacity to create, inside China, large, voluntary online communities that are independent of the government. These include nearly all blogging services, wikipedia and wiki platforms generally (wikileaks included), social networking websites and peer-to-peer technologies of all kinds, including photo-sharing and video-sharing businesses. In other words, the full panoply of internet 2.0 technologies.

Websites commanding vast audiences for user-generated content are seen by authorities as a grave threat. The Chinese government’s worst nightmare, after all, is a lone and anonymous Tibetan uploading to YouTube grainy cellphone videos of rioting police.

What this boils down to IMO, is that there is probably currently little that bloggers like myself can do to pass along to the Chinese the hazards of consumerism from a western perspective. Considering the worldwide environmental impact which China is having as it becomes increasingly consumer oriented, this is indeed unfortunate. Also unfortunate is the lack of potential for the Chinese to share information with each other through blogging and social networking.

Interesting surge in the number of hits for wikileaks cover names

I had a huge (for this blog and for the previous amount of interest) surge of traffic here today from search engines for the terms wikileaks cover names and “wikileaks cover names” with over 60 combined hits on those two so far today. I’ll have to poke around the internet and see whether I can determine what might have caused the sudden interest, I guess. Anyway, nice to see it.

ETA: It may be that this now ranks 2nd in the Google results for wikileaks cover names (I don’t know, but I doubt it did before today). Darn, I was hoping there was a big news story on it and that everyone else was enjoying a similar surge. Oh well.

An archive of the cover names as they existed a few months ago can be found here

Of course, the fact that wikileaks doesn’t seem to be responding at the moment may have something to do with it as well… in fact none of the cover names I’ve tried so (quite a few) far respond either. Coincidence or DOS? Who knows.

Threat Level @ Wired.com- Judge Backtracks: WikiLeaks Resumes U.S. Operations

Good news!

Judge Backtracks: WikiLeaks Resumes U.S. Operations

SAN FRANCISCO — A federal judge on Friday allowed whistle-blower site WikiLeaks to resume operation in the United States, a week after ordering its U.S.  hosting company and domain registrar to shut down and lock the renegade’s site from the internet.

The judge conceded the futility of attempts to censor information, in this instance private banking records, after it has been posted to the internet.

“When this genie gets out of the bottle, it’s out for all purposes,” U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White said after a more than 3-hour-long hearing here. Earlier, White said he had “an obligation to get it right” and that “I took an oath to uphold the Constitution.”

The wikileaks court order

Apparently POGO, the ACLU and EFF (among others) are stepping up in protest of the recent court order against wikileaks, which apparently says something like (I haven’t read it, so don’t give me notice of it please)

The judge also issued a temporary restraining order that forbade Wikileaks from displaying, posting, publishing or distributing any material pertaining to the bank on any site that it directly owned or over which it had any control. The order instructed Wikileaks to ensure that all of the bank’s information was removed from all Web sites it owned or controlled, to disable links to the material on such sites and to provide the court with proof that it had complied with the orders. The judge’s order even enjoined everyone who read the order or received notice of it from publishing or even linking to the documents.

quote source

I’ve read that the owners of The Pirate Bay are among those who mirror the wikileaks site, though I haven’t verified that.

I can just imagine the kind of legal threats and replies that might go on there… (hint- if you are squemish about reading four letter words, DON’T read The Pirate Bay’s replies to legal threats.)