Google is, without doubt, the world’s search engine of choice. From humble beginnings as a Stanford University research project, it has grown into more than a website: it is a road map for the entire world wide web. Behind Google’s simple home page lies an immensely powerful search tool — and many fact-seekers wish they were more familiar with the site’s secrets.

A new, unofficial Google manual is published this week, lifting the lid on its less familiar charms. Here, the first of two excerpts revisits essential routes to better googling and reveals further techniques to save time when searching, making your next dive for pearls of wisdom more effective than ever...

BEING SPECIFIC

Google is a smart site, but it cannot read your mind. If you search for apple, Google does not know whether you are more interested in the fruit, the computer company, the Beatles’ label, New York City, the singer Fiona or something else altogether. Try entering as search terms apple nutrition, Apple software, Apple Records, the Big Apple or Fiona Apple. Bear in mind that Google cares about the search details. A few cases stand out:

TO QUOTE A PHRASE

If you want only the web pages that contain your words in order, enclose them in quote marks. So, if you search for “to be or not to be”, Google gives you matches that include that whole, exact phrase.

SEARCHING WITHIN RESULTS

You want to find the most famous soliloquy spoken by Hamlet. So you search for “to be or not to be”, enclosing the phrase in quotes, and Google produces 180,000 results. Double your Google effectiveness by hitting the Search Within Results link at the bottom of any results page and adding another keyword that is likely to appear in the text, such as question or perchance or dream. Doing so produces a link to www.allshakespeare.com, which contains the complete speech.

JUST SAY NO

Google doesn’t understand the word NOT, a command familiar to techies and parents of two-year-olds. But it does let you use a minus sign or hyphen (-) to indicate that you do not want a certain term to appear in your results. This negation trick is most helpful when you are searching for a term with more than one meaning, such as compact. If you want results about compact discs, but not cars or make-up, try: compact -car -makeup.

THROWING OUT WILD CARDS

Many search engines employ wild cards — special symbols, usually an asterisk (*), that you add to a term to indicate different possibilities. If you are not sure whether Culture Club’s singer was Boy George or Boy Gorge, you might search elsewhere for Boy G*. Google doesn’t let you include a wild card as part of a word, but it does offer full-word wild cards, which can come in handy for filling in memory blanks. Say you have always wondered what Debbie Harry was singing in the first line of Heart of Glass. Type in “Once I had a * and it was a gas ”; Google gives 514 links suggesting that the lyric is “Once I had a love ...” Combining the asterisk with quote marks can be good for finding quotations, song lyrics, poetry and other phrases. The asterisk can stand in for your x factor when you want the answer to a question: Halley’s comet appears every * years. If you type your query as a question — “How often does Halley’s comet appear?” — Google searches for instances of the question, which is one way to find other people with limited knowledge of astronomy, but might not turn up the answer.

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