Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
8 billion documents in its index, and I'm conident that index hasn't got-
ten any smaller! he advantage to that is that Google indexes astonishing
amounts of material, from every possible corner of the Web.
You can monitor general search engines not only for links to your sites,
as we discussed in the last chapter, but also for long queries focused on
unusual, narrow topics. When applying the theory of onions to full-text
search engines, make sure your topics are as narrow as possible. Google's
query limit is 32 words—you want to push that limit!
Building your queries
Start building your Google queries using as many words as possible.
Remember, you can always remove words later. Use as many of the spe-
cial syntax options as you can think of. he title and site syntax will prob-
ably work best. Avoid inurl —it's diicult to guess which words might be
included in the URL of a Web site.
hints
n
explore the advanced search page to see if it can help you. for 
example, say you're searching mostly in english and your query 
has a few french words. Limit your search to pages in english 
and see how that changes your results. You might also want to 
limit the country your results are coming from, if applicable, 
though in my experience that limits your results too much. 
n
if you put a tilde (~) in front of a word for which you're 
searching, google will ind synonyms for the word in addition 
to the word itself. for example, ~television would ind news, 
TV, network, etc. You can tell which words are matching your 
tilded query because they're bolded in the search result snip-
pets. Try experimenting with that. for much fun, search for a 
word with a tilde and then exclude the word itself, like this: 
~television -television. 
Trapping
For e-mail alerts of new pages added to Google's index, use the Google Alerts
feature (google.com/alerts) we talked about earlier in Chapter 4. If you want
your results in RSS format, use Google Alert (googlealert.com), which we also
talked about in Chapter 4.
Search WWH ::




Custom Search