Do You Know How to Google?

            Google. It's the top answer to anyone's question when another person falls short of coming up with a reasonable answer. The search process begins with a simple, "Hmm, I don't know. Go 'Google' it." On the Google website, the common user would input a series of words which seem most appropriate to find what they are looking for. The common user also has the mindset that, “If it’s not on the first or second page of Google, it doesn’t exist”. In some cases this may be true, but little do they know that the Google search engine contains a variety of options available to filter and narrow down the desired search results.

            An example would be when I search, “How do the Democratic and Republican positions on the “fiscal cliff” differ?” When you casually search up the referred question above, Google delivers to you, “About 31,900,000 results (0.22 seconds)”. The large number obviously refers to the number of search results found. Interestingly, the “(0.22 seconds)” indicates the time in seconds it took Google to find what you were looking for. This brings us to the first few search operators are “AND”, “OR”, and “NOT”. These operators can be considered the “first level” of filtering, because they remove a large number of irrelevant search results. When I add one of the three above search operators, it cuts down the amount of results by 31,819,700! When I added “NOTObama” to the original search result, Google took 0.48 seconds to filter out my results and leave me with only 80,300 results! I emphasize on the “only” because considering the fact there were originally roughly 31 million, I’m pretty sure I’d much rather search through a mere 80,300 results rather than a whopping 31 million!

            Is that it? Nope! There’s much more! Suppose I want to refine and filter my searches even more; I want to find present-day, recent answers for my question. When I click upon a time range of one year, my resulting searches amount to About 13,900 results, (taking Google 0.29 seconds to search for results using the new, added option). Although time ranges are not considered operators, they do significantly narrow down your search results even more.

            The next search operator Google has is the minus sign, (-). The minus sign works similar to the “NOT” operator, but proves to be much more effective. For example, when I change my search to, “How do the Democratic Republican positions on the “fiscal cliff” differ? NOTObama –jobs”  my resulting amount of searches yet again drastically cuts down and narrows to about 3,480 results, taking Google 0.21 seconds to show me my more improved search. The reasoning behind it is that the minus sign completely eradicates all resulting searches that include the key term “jobs”. According to the derived numbers, about 10,000 of the searches from the previous filter alone contained the word “jobs”. In an actual search I would use another word in place of jobs, because in reality jobs are in fact important in relation to the "fiscal cliff". I used this example to prove the power and abilities these search operators hold, making searching for all things on Google easier with utmost precision. The searches can be narrowed further; it's  what I did next out of curiosity. When I added more “minus+keywords” the results narrowed down further.

            Using the given time I had at the LIC, the most narrow results I was able to derive were about 132 results, taking approximately 0.32 seconds to search. In the end, I was able to find a an article from the search which gave me a clear and concise answer as to what each political party wanted with the economy,  and also defined how their positions differ. From this experience, I learned how to use the Google search operators to find more specific results. I look forward to using these operators and other various search tools from now on whenever I find the need to Google something!