BT Help >  Google Search

All work and no play, makes Jack a dull boy!

Here are some links that you would like!

⁰¹⁾     Search Google using the power of your mind : MentalPlex

02)  The Technology Behind Google’s great results: PigeonRank

03)  Job Opportunities to Work for Google on Moon: Google Copernicus Center

04)  Smart Drinks designed to maximize surfing efficiency: Google Gulp

05)  Pin all your Romantic Hopes on Google: Google Romance

06)  Those who don’t like emails, save your emails in paper format with: Gmail Paper

07)  Connecting homes with the web through commode-based router : Google TiSP

08)  Search what’s going to happen tomorrow now: gDay

09)  Send Backdated emails using: Gmail Customer Time

10)  Google Talk going Green: GTGG

11)  Google helps you getting out of bed in the Morning: Google Wake Up Kit!

12)  A joint venture between Virgin Group and Google for establishment of human settlement on Mars: Project Virgle

13)  Let Google Search your Brain using CADIE: Google Brain Search

14)  Get most out of YouTube, try this New Viewing Experience.

15)  Let Gmail reply for emails received by you, using Gmail Autopilot.

16)  A technological marvel, a football with Google technology in it: gBall.

17)  Google Chrome with 3D: Google Chrome with 3D

(This really works, but I doubt if the 3D glasses provided will work)

18)  Easter Bunny Game by Google.

19)  Google Earth Flight Stimulator. (Tried it out, this really works.)

Download Google Earth.

Flight Simulator Keyboard Controls.

20)  The Strangest Sights in Google Earth compiled by Tom Spring, PC World.

21)  Most Spectacular Sights in Google Sky compiled by PC World.

22)  List of Google Holiday Logos and Google Fun Logos. Also checkout this Museum of Google Logos.

23)  Type “about:internets” and “about:crash” in Google Chrome Browser and see the results. Alternatively type “about:mozilla”, “about:robots”, “about:blocked”, or “about:credits” in Mozilla Firefox Browser to get some funny cool results.

24)  If you sets the “Beach” iGoogle theme, then at 3:14 AM every morning, the Loch Ness Monster surfaces for 1 minute. The reason for the timing of 3:14 is rumoured to be a tribute to the number pi. Similarly “Spring Scape” shows a Monster; "Tea House" shows ghostly fox spirits in the lake; “City Scape” shows UFOs; “Sweet Dreams” show a pi symbol Π formed using starts; and “Winter Scape” shows Northern Lights.

25)  Google offers services in different languages: Pirate, Hackers, Klingon, Pig Latin, et cetera.

26)  Check out these amusing and entertaining Google Search Easter Eggs:

a)     “the answer to life, the universe, and everything”

b)    “number of horns on a unicorn”

c)     “worst band in the world”

d)    “once in a blue moon”

e)     “recursion”

BT Help >  Google Search

Advanced Search Form:

Okay now that you have got a slight idea of some of the stuff that Google can help you with, let’s look at how to use the Advanced Search Form page provided by Google. To go here, click on the Advanced Search link provided at the right of the search box.

Structure of Advanced Search Form:

Please note the pictorial representation of the Form is self-explanatory, hence additional info is not provided on the use of each of the form fields.

To know more about Advanced Search Form and it’s use, please visit GoogleGuide’s webpage explaining Advanced Search Form.

Note: Google is vast, numerous Google engineers and software programmers around the world are working day-in and day-out to make our lives easier. To try to explain the full scope and ability of the simple looking search engine is not possible in a few pages. Only limited information that would prove useful to a transcriptionist has been provided here.

To learn more about our beloved Google Search Engine go to this wonderful site that explains the intricacies of this simple looking, yet complex search engine; www.GoogleGuide.com.

To keep yourself updated with all the key developments at Google visit:

The Official Google Blog, Google Help Center, or Google Labs.

BT Help >  Google Search

Reference Tools provided by Google:

1)    Time: To see the time in a particular city, type “time” and name of the city.

Eg: time new york

2)    Unit Conversion: To convert between different units of measurement such as height, weight, volume, et cetera.

Eg: 69 kg in pounds, 365 days in hours, 3500 millilitres in litres,

0.5 cents in dollars, 26 meters in feet, et cetera.

3)    Definition: To see a definition of a word or phrase, first type define, then space, and then the word or phrase. Definition for the entire phrase would be provided in case you put a phrase as a query.

E.g.: define greatness, define beat a dead horse.

4)    Spell Checker: Google has an inbuilt spell checker which checks whether the query you have typed uses the most common spelling of a given word, and ask you ‘Did you mean: (Correct Word).

E.g.: Buziness Manaement.

5)    Currency Conversion: The inbuilt currency converter tool of Google helps you with currency conversion.

E.g.: 150 USD in INR, 3400 USD in yen, 4500 yen in GBP, et cetera.

6)    Calculator: Simply enter your calculation into the Google Search Box, and the built-in calculator will give you the answer.

E.g.: 22+4-(4*6)/3, 22+(4-4)*6/3, et cetera.

Calculator Operators	Meaning	Type
+	addition	25+5
-	subtraction	25-5
*	multiplication	25*5
/	division	25/5
% of	percentage of	25% of 5
^	raise to a power	5^3
sqrt	square root	sqrt 25

Note: Google follows the Order of Operations, i.e., BODMAS, when doing a calculation. Thus put your query right to get the right results. Click on the link provided below to know more about BODMAS.

[BODMAS: Bracket, Order, Divide, Multiply, Add, Subtract]

BT Help >  Google Search

Using Advanced Search Operators for Google Search:

1)     intitle: Using this syntax restricts the search to the title of web pages. Here only the term specified next to the syntax is searched for.

E.g.: intitle:Business, intitle:"Warren Buffet"

2)     allintitle: Using this syntax does the work of the intitle: syntax, but searches for all the specified terms, not the only query word placed next to the syntax.

E.g.: allintitle:"Warren Buffet" quotes best

3)     inurl: Using this syntax restricts the search to the URLs of web pages. Here only the term specified next to the syntax is searched for.

E.g.: inurl:marketing management, inurl:"marketing management"

4)     allinurl: Using this syntax does the work of the inurl: syntax, but searches for all the specified search terms, not the only query word placed next to the syntax.

     E.g.: allinurl:"market analysis" invest

5)     site: This syntax searches only the particular website that you put after this syntax. This is the most useful syntax for a transcriptionist, as it enables him to search only the site of a particular company and get accurate results out of the search. (Explained in detail in the Research section)

E.g.: site:www.microsoft.com “Bill Gates”

6)     filetype: Using this syntax will give you results with a particular file type or files with a specific extension.

Eg.: "Business Management", filetype:pdf

7)     related: Using this syntax will help you find websites or web pages that are similar to the specified website or web page provided as query.

E.g.: related:www.google.com, related:www.dictionary.com.

8)     define: This syntax is used to search for definitions of a particular term.

E.g.: define:transcription, define:teleconference

Note: For more detailed information about these and other such Advanced Search Operators please visit Google Advanced Search Operators

BT Help >  Google Search

Use of Special Characters in Google Search:

1)     Quoted Text [“text”] : To search for a set of words, i.e., phrases type the words in quotes. You will get results matching the exact phrase. Also note here stop words (common words like and, to, for) are not ignored.

E.g.: "If a business does well"

2)     The Plus Sign [ +text ] : This is used in front of a word to force Google to search for a word. Usually this is used in the case of stop words that are ignored by Google when searching for results.

Eg.: Try both Class A Shares and Class +A Shares; see the difference in results.

3)     The Minus Sign [ -text ] : This is used in front of a word to exclude it from the results. This means that you want to exclude pages containing that particular term. This is usually used when you want to narrow down your search results.

E.g.: Suppose you want to search Manx, which has basically two meaning a) a type of cat with no tail, and b) a type of language. Now if you want to exclude references to cat from the results type Manx -cat.

4)     The Asterisk Sign [ * ] : Google uses asterisk sign as a wildcard to match one or more words in a Quoted Phrase.

E.g.: "It's fine to celebrate success * lessons of failure"

5)      The Tilde Sign [ ~ ] : In maths this means “is similar to.” When you put tis sign before a term Google will search for two things. Synonymous and Autonymous words of that query term, and also variations of the query term, i.e. putting “~” before the query term “sell” the results you get are for terms “sell” “auction” “buy” “sales” “seller” “selling” et cetera.

E.g.: ~sell

BT Help >  Google Search

A few quick dos and don’ts while doing Google Search

1)     Don’t put a question as a query. Google only searches for words. Hence put specific words, no long sentences.

2)     Don’t use stop words. Google ignores stop words like “do,” “where,” “for,” “I,” “as,” et cetera, as they’re irrelevant for research. Hence don’t bother typing them.

3)     Be specific. Being to the point and specific is very important. Giving Google vague ideas will result in vague results. E.g.: If you want to search Royal Bank of Scotland, put Royal Bank Scotland, not Royal Bank.

4)     Don’t correct spelling mistakes. Google mostly recognizes spelling mistakes and suggests the alternative spelling that you can look up. E.g.: If you type:  Business Commication, Google will give an alternative: Business Communication, highlighting the word with the spelling mistake.

5)     The more the number of query terms, the narrower the result. Thus to narrow down your result to get the desired info key in more query terms. Google has increased its query term limit to 32 words, so use this to your advantage. Previously the word limit was 10, extra words were simply not taken into consideration. E.g.: Royal Bank gives 26,900,000 results, and Royal Bank Scotland gives 8,170,000 results.

6)      Query terms should be put in order. Google gives higher priority to results that have terms in the same order as the order of the query terms.

7)     Google is not case-sensitive. Hence don’t waste time pressing the Shift key again and again for upper case; both upper case and lower case use would give you the same results. Google Case-Sensitive and google case-sensitive gives the same number of results, 22,500,000.

8)      Use hyphenated terms where applicable. Hyphenated terms are used in different ways, with hyphen or as one word. Google searches for both variations when a hyphenated term is used for query. Eg. carryforward gives 303,000 results; whereas carry-forward gives 31,100,000 results.

BT Help >  Google Search

The Structure of a Google Search!

Search Box: This is where you put your query. The results are listed by Google in order of relevance to the query. The most relevant being the first.

Page Title: The title of the webpage or the URL when the page has no title.

Snippet: A short excerpt of the text which matches your input query, with the search item in bold typeface (in this case America).

URL: Web address of the search result.

Cached: This is a snapshot of the webpage taken by Google earlier, which is used to match the result to the query. Sometimes the information provided on the webpage is changed after it has been indexed by Google, then the cached provided proves to be useful.

Similar Pages: This gives us links to other sites that are similar to that particular result. For example, if you are interested in finding sites similar to Wikipedia. Search Wikipedia, when you get the www.wikipedia.com link in the Search Results. Click on ‘Similar pages’ and Google will list sites similar to Wikipedia.

Definitions: This link gives you definition for the query word provided by Answers.com. When you put more than one word as input query, both the words will be highlighted in blue, bold, and underlined, i.e., American Independence. Clicking on the link will take you to the definition.

Number of Results: This shows you the number of hits you have received from Google for the particular search query.

Preference: This link takes you to the preference page of Google, so that you can save your preferences like Interface Language, Search Language, Safe Search preference, Number of Results, etc.

It is advisable that a transcriber or editor sets his Number of Results preference to 100. Doing this will show 100 results in the results page, and not the usual 10. This helps as you don’t have to click ‘Next’ after looking at every 10 results.   

BT Help >  Google Search

Google Search, the Right Way!

Google Search is simple, just type in a few words, press enter and Voila! You get thousands of results to choose from. What’s there to learn?

On July 25^th, 2008, the team at Google came out with an announcement that Google has reached the milestone of indexing one trillion unique URLs on the Web.

One Trillion = 1,000,000,000,000

i.e., if you check out each website for just one second, it would take you 31,709 Years to check all of the URLs.

Anyway it churns out a few thousand results for us to choose from for any query that we put in the search window. For a transcriber getting fast, accurate and relevant information is of essence, as he has to work within a limited turnaround time. To do so a transcriber needs to understand the basic structure of a Google Results page and learn a few tricks that will help to make his search efforts more fruitful.

Click on the links below to go to the specific subject:

1)     The Structure of a Google Search!

2)     Google Search Dos and Don’ts!

3)     Use of Special Characters

4)     Using Advance Search Operators

5)     Reference Tools

6)     Advance Search Form

7)     Google Easter Eggs!