1. The Confident Researcher: Google Away (Module 2) The Confident Researcher: Google Away 2

2. Overview 1)Definitions 2)How Google works 3)Simple searching 4)Understanding your results The Confident Researcher: Google Away 2

3. That’s What That Is! More Definitions The Confident Researcher: Google Away 2

4. CACHE The place where information is stored, for our purposes, by browsers. It is often only temporary. KEYWORD(S) A keyword is a word that is used in a search. Most of the time, these are NOT articles, conjunctions or prepositions. PHRASE A phrase is made up of more than one keyword and may use articles, prepositions, and conjunctions. POPULARITY RANKING OF SEARCH RESULTS The order of your search results based on the number of people who have links to a particular page. So, if you are doing a search about cats, the first result listed in Google is the page that has the most number of links to it. UPDATED When a page is updated, it means that some part of the page has been changed. Pages that are frequently updated are news, weather, etc.

5. The Sublime Mysteries of Google: Don’t Worry if You Don’t Understand The Confident Researcher: Google Away 2

6. How Google Works* Google runs on a unique combination of advanced hardware and software. The speed you experience can be attributed in part to the efficiency of our search algorithm and partly to the thousands of low cost PC's we've networked together to create a superfast search engine. The heart of our software is PageRank™, a system for ranking web pages developed by our founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University. And while we have dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of Google on a daily basis, PageRank continues to play a central role in many of our web search tools. PageRank Explained PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages' relative importance. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.* * Accessed 7/4/2007.

7. Lost Yet? Don’t Worry. No Problem. You don’t have to understand it all to use it. The Confident Researcher: Google Away 2

8. Simple Searches: The Big Easy The Confident Researcher: Google Away 2

9. WHAT you type and HOW you type it is extremely important to good searching. First of all, you need a question that want answered. Our example question will be: how many fat grams are there in one scoop of Baskin Robbins vanilla ice cream?

11. Notice the URL for the top result is not the Baskin- Robbins homepage, but www.dietdetective.com. Let’s follow this link and see if it can provide us with the right information.www.dietdetective.com

12. This is the homepage for dietdectives.com. Notice that you have to read a lot of stuff and scroll down before you find a link to Baskin-Robbins’ homepage about nutrition. Note well that nowhere on this page is the Fat Content of 1 scoop of Vanilla Ice Cream. The top search result did NOT answer your question because Google ranks pages according to popularity NOT according to the BEST kind of information.

13. If you were able to find the link from the other page, you would have been brought to this page. This is the page you were looking for, but you’re still not all the way there. However, most people don’t link their sites to this page or visit pages like this very often. THEREFORE it isn’t even in the top 100 results of Google even though it is exactly the page you want.

14. By following the link from the previous page, you get to this information– exactly the information we wanted. But there is an easier way...

15. Less Is More: A Simple Way to Make Simple Searches Less Complicated The Confident Researcher: Google Away 2

16. Simply typing in “Baskin Robbins” will give you the right page as the second result. In other words, Google is NO SUBSITUTE FOR CLEAR THINKING!

17. The Goldilocks Problem: Exact Searches The Confident Researcher: Google Away 2

18. To search for the EXACT phrase in the EXACT same order, put all of the words in quotation marks. For example, “fat content of one scoop of Baskin Robbins vanilla ice cream”. This is what you get: In other words, NOTHING! That’s because there are no pages in the Google database that have that EXACT phrase on them. Notice that Google gives you some advice about how to search more wisely.

19. Review: To find answers to your questions be sure to 1)Spell correctly (open a Word document in an another window and type the word you don’t know there) 2)Use keywords and, if necessary, change the keywords and/or their order. 3)Try more general keywords. If you’re looking for something very specific like a phrase, an idiom, statistics, or a friend, be sure to use “ ” around the word(s) or name(s). The Confident Researcher: Google Away 2

20. What’s All this Stuff?: Understanding Your Results The Confident Researcher: Google Away 2

21. With every search, you get lots of results. Here’s how to understand what the results page is telling you. These are the first three results for Baskin Robbins. Everything underlined and in blue will take you to a new page (hyperlinked). This is the number of pages that have Baskin Robbins on them that are in the Google database. These are the URL’s of the links. (all written with www.) The keyword(s) you are searching for is in bold. These are the words Google searched for. In this case, it focused on Robbins.

22. “Cached” simply means a link to a page that is stored in the Google database. It is not the most recent page, but the one with the words you’re looking for highlighted.

23. Notice all the information that the cached page tells you. It tells when the cache was last updated and links you to the current page. It’s important to note that in some cases, the cached page and the current page will be different– especially if the current page is updated often. This is the URL for the cached page (the one you’re looking at), NOT the current page.

24. Following the link “Similar pages” will take you to another results page like this. Finding similar pages is helpful for comparison and contrasting the same type or kind of information from different sources.

25. The Problem of the Cache: Always Behind The Confident Researcher: Google Away 2

26. If the page you’re looking for is frequently updated like a news website, the cached page and the current page will be drastically different. Remember also, that once the cached page is updated, ALL the information that changed on the current page and the old information (including the way it was arranged) is no longer on the web. Some news services archive (store) their stories, but there is no guarantee you will be able to find exactly what you saw yesterday. Cached page from 2/7/2007 accessed 3/7/2007 Current page from 3/7/2007 accessed 3/7/2007

27. So, what does cached mean for you? It means that there might be something that is currently happening that isn’t in the Google database so Google will not be able to find it. At best, it will provide you with a link to a current page that can tell you about it. In other words, EVERY story, video, and image on the current CNN page is NOT accessible (yet) through Google searching. Google can ONLY search its cache (its files of pictures of different websites). It cannot search the “living” web. The Confident Researcher: Google Away 2

28. Congratulations! You have completed Module 2! You are ready to move on to Module 3 with your teacher’s approval. The Confident Researcher: Google Away 2