The Computer Corner
By Charles Millar, Aug 4, 2006

Making Google eyes

This week we take a look at several "hacks'" or insiders' secrets having to do with the Google search engine. Point your browser to " www.google.com " then keep reading.

The first simple Google secret is to learn you can search separately for a specific phrase or group of words by putting them inside double quotation marks.

If you search for the words "new" and "Mexico," Google will return more than a hundred million hits for pages containing those words. Enclose your search for "New Mexico" in double-quotes and the search will be restricted to finding pages with those two words together in that order.

The second simple Google secret is to learn you can exclude specific words from your search simply by putting a minus sign in front of them. If you want to search for x but not those sites including y, then search for "x -y" to get what you want.

Searching Google for the word "Mexico" returns a lot of hits for sites in New Mexico. The way to exclude New Mexico from your Mexico search is to enter "Mexico" -"new" to exclude the word "new." A better technique would be to combine this tweak with the last one by searching for "Mexico" -"New Mexico."

The third little-known secret is that the Google search engine can be used to search only a specified site. This is extremely helpful if you know "widget" is on the "www.bigsite.com" site, but you do not know where.

To instruct Google to search only one specific website, enter the term you want to search followed by the word "site" followed by a colon and the name of the site-but for this secret do not use quotation marks. For example, appending site:microsoft.com after your search term would tell Google not to look anywhere except on that site.

It amazes me how many times I have gone to Microsoft's knowledge base looking for something their site search cannot find. When I search the same site using site:www.microsoft.com the Google search engine will find what I am looking for right there where Microsoft's own search found nothing.

Everyone who has ever done any internet surfing at all has at one time or another seen the "page not found" message when your computer is unable to reach the web page you want to see. There are a host of reasons for encountering this error message, and I am not going to go into any of them today. What I do want to share with our readers is a work-around that can sometimes help you to see a web page that is down and in some cases even see a web page that no longer actually exists on the internet.

Using the Google search engine you will notice included in the search results next to each item is a link called "Cached." The next time you encounter the "page not found" error, try searching for it on www.google.com. Click on the word "cached" and Google will display its saved copy of the website. The Google version will be text only-few graphics, no sound, no fancy stuff. This actually works for many web pages that have been removed from the web. The information is not always completely up-to-date, but it is surprising how often the cached copy does have the information you seek.

An interesting aside to the Google cache feature is the issue of censorship. In certain controlled states, such as China, the government attempts to censor internet access. The people were quick to find that a lot of the prohibited information was available through the "backdoor" of Google's cache.

Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant, a frequent visitor to San Miguel since 1981 and now practically a full-time resident. He may be contacted at 044-415-153-8528 or email FAQ@SMAguru.com