False Creek Geek: Understanding Google

My latest column for the Yaletown View. My geekier readers will be familiar with Google’s many powers, but others may not:

Everybody knows about Google. Even
great-grandmothers who have never touched a computer are vaguely familiar with
the ubiquitous search engine. You know you’ve made it big as a brand when your
name gets converted to a verb (see also Xerox and Fedex). Though millions of
people use that simple search box at Google.com every day, there’s a lot more
behind Google than you might think.

Founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin at
Stanford University, nine years ago, Google has grown from a school project
(called BackRub, for its ability to analyze the ‘back links’ pointing to
a given site) to a 1000-person company that indexes more than 3 billion Web
pages, and enables users to search in 35 languages, including Icelandic, Hebrew
and Estonian.

But on to the site itself. Here are a few
tricks for basic searches:

• To improve your search results, put quotation
  marks around exact phrases you want to find. For example, searching for native
  art returns 4,230,000 results. But if you search for “native art”,
  you’ll get more accuracy from 37,200 results.
• To search for pages that exclude a particular
  term, use a minus sign. For example, if you’re looking for information on London, Ontario, you might want to search for London Ontario –England.
• You can also access image, old-school USENET
  newsgroup and breaking news (http://news.google.ca/)
  searches off the Google front page.

That’s really just the tip of the
iceberg—Google is a very powerful search tool. The Christmas season is here, so
you might want to comparison shop for a product. Try out Froogle (http://froogle.google.com), Google’s
product search engine. The results are in American dollars and American stores,
but it’s still a pretty useful site. Additionally, check out Google Catalogs (http://catalogs.google.com/cathp),
where Google has scanned and made searchable thousands of popular product
catalogs.

The fun continues with Google Zeitgeist (a
German word meaning ‘the ideas prevalent in a period and place’), a page (http://www.google.ca/press/zeitgeist.html)
which describes patterns and trends in search results. What people search for
tells us a great deal about them. For example, John Ritter and Johnny
Cash were #3 and #5 respectively among the top Canadian search queries in
September, 2003. To our national shame, Canadian Idol, was number #2 and
Toronto Maple Leafs was number #8.

Those are a few of the secrets behind
Google’s innocent façade. And that’s just what’s available from the company.
Google has wisely provided programmatical access to their search engine, so
that others can build technology based on Google. This has resulted in hundreds
of useful new applications, including Google by email (http://www.capescience.com/google/)
or easy searching by date. If you’re interested in learning more about these
technologies, I recommend Tara Calishain’s Google Hacks, a book of 100
tips, tricks and scripts.

Good searching!