Building A Basic Search Query

< Google Manual

Running a Google query means entering your search criteria into Google’s search field and requesting the search results. This search field is found either on the main Google page:

or on the Search Results page:

In addition, you might find a search field on some web sites. Wherever you find it, you can use the same query for the same results (be aware that some web sites may have “site-flavored” search boxes which limit your search to certain pre-selected categories).

What criteria to use for the Search Query?

Your natural inclination is to enter whatever word you think might match up with the sites you are looking for. This word is called a keyword. After pressing enter, the search results page will display all the sites that contain the keyword you entered. The keyword could be in the text, title URL or hidden META tags. Note: that capitalization is ignored.

Unless this keyword is unique (which is difficult with gazillions of web page indexed), you are going to have a very long list of search results. For example, searching for [supercalifragilisticexpialidocious] resulted in 43,300 pages! Obviously, you need to narrow it down. Imagine if you keyed in a more popular word. Let’s say you are a golf enthusiast and key in [golf]. That will give you 147,000,000 results.

Now if you just wanted the most popular, general sites for golf, you could find some in your results list because the most popular pages rise to the top. Our search brought up golf.com, golfweb.com, golfchannel.com, golddigest.com and more on the first page. If that’s the type of popular site you need to find, that might work for you. But, usually you need to look deeper than that. So how do you do that?

Multiple Keywords

You can start by entering more than one keyword. If you key more than one, all keywords must be found on the page. To get technical, this is called a logical AND. Returning to the subject of golf, let’s say you want to find out about the golf scene in Boise, ID. Perform the search with the query [golf Boise]. This returns 1,100,000 results.

You get the basic idea. You can keep adding more keywords to narrow down the list. You might add words like spa and country club to try to find exactly the type of place you are looking for. Don’t let the huge number of pages that come up scare you; remember, the list is sorted in order of relevance. Google will display the most popular sites first. At the tail end of the results listing you might find pages in which people simply mentioning it in their family blog or something.

Keep in mind that Google gives higher priority to pages with search terms that are found in the same order as you structured them in your query, and if the words on the page are close in proximity.

Compound Words

There are quite a few compound words that are sometimes found combined into one word, sometimes separated into multiple words and sometimes connected together with a hyphen. If you are searching for one of these words, is it important which format you use to search? You bet it is, if you don’t want to miss anything.

First off, let’s make sure we all understand the types of conditions I’m talking about. I don’t know about other languages, but the English language can be very confusing in its seemingly arbitrary spelling of compound words and phrases. A word phrase can be spelled as a solid compound, a hyphenated compound or spaced words. Do you spell it database, data base or data-base, website, web site or web-site, fundraiser, fund raiser or fund-raiser? There are hundreds of words and phrases that are like this.

And then there are the acronyms or made up sets of letters/words that have an irregular use of the hyphen. Take for example the Apple operating system OS X. Or is it OSX or OS-X? There is obviously one preferred usage, developed by Apple, but it doesn’t mean everyone spells it that way.

So, how do you search for these? You don’t want to miss anything, and you certainly don’t want to perform three searches. You also don’t want to have to tale the time to build a query with the OR operator.

If you were to perform the search as spaced words, such as [left handed], you’ll get pages with ‘left handed’ and ‘left-handed’, but no ‘lefthanded’. If you search for [lefthanded] you’ll only get ‘lefthanded’.

But, if you search for [left-handed] you get it all!

ANSWER: Always search for compound words with the hyphen and you’ll pull up pages that may use all three variations..

Automatic Exclusion of Common Words, Punctuation and Special Characters

Google ignores common words and characters such as “the” and “how”, as well as certain single digits and single letters. This is done because they are virtually omnipresent and therefore slow down and expand your search without improving results. If Google considered any of your words to be common words it will note this in a message just below the search field.

If a common word is essential to getting the results you want, you can include it by putting a “+” sign in front of it. (Be sure to include a space before the “+” sign.) Enclosing multiple words in quotes to form a phrase (more on that later) does the same thing.

Other than the special characters you’ll learn about later that have special relevance to Google, most punctuation will be ignored. There is an exception, and that is the apostrophe since it is used in contractions.

Word Variations (Stemming)

Google uses something called stemming technology. When it considers it appropriate, it will search not only for your search terms, but also for words that are similar to some or all of those terms. What it does, essentially, is match other versions of a word by chopping it down to its basic form and matching different endings. Take the word “runs”. Its most basic form is “run”. Stemming will match run, runs, running, runner and runners. These stemmed words are assigned less relevance because they aren’t an exact match. But they are still considered a match.

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