Google Search : Java Glossary

Google is a primarily a particularly good search engine. They screwed thousands of people by withdrawing their programmer API (Application Programming Interface) and now won’t let anyone use it with a program, only a browser.

Limiting Searches

• Limiting a Search To A Single Site

  Use site:mindprod.com in your search criteria to limit search to one site.

• Limiting a Search To A Single newsgroup

  Use group:comp.lang.java.programmer in your search criteria to limit search to one newsgroup. You must do a Google groups search not a Google web search.

• Finding a similar Page

  Use related:mindprod.com/religion/god.html Find pages similar to this URL (Uniform Resource Locator).

• Find a Definition

  Use define:zeugma definitions of a term.

• Find a Website

  Use inurl:sun find websites with the word sun in the domain name.

• Finding links To a Site

  Use link:mindprod.com to find links to that website from other websites. Find out who is talking about you. Unfortunately, there is a bug in Google, so you can’t pair link: with site: to find what a particular site is saying about you. Last revised/verified: 2009-04-29

• Excluding a word

  nuts -almonds means documents containing he word nuts, but not documents also containing the word almonds. There must be no space after the - but there must be one before it.

• Exact phrase

  peanut butter with the quotes, insists the words appear in that order with nothing in between.

• Relaxed Search

  almonds OR nuts means get documents containing either almonds or nuts or both. A normal search insists on all the words.

• Extension filetype

  filetype:pdf gets only Adobe pdf documents. filetype:html gets only html documents, (especially useful for Google Desktop that indexes more file types.) -filetype:pdf gets everything but pdf documents.

You can get at other limiters with Google Advanced Search checkboxes, then look at the HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) query generated and learn to compose it directly yourself.

more search tips

Google International

Webmaster Concerns

In the olden days, when Google redirected someone to your site as the result of a search, they would include the list of keywords used to find you in the HTTP header. This would help you understand how people were searching for you. They have stopped doing this. However, now you can get a summary of this information using the Google Webmaster Tools.

Summing Up

1. A search engine should rank pages by how many links there are to them. This is a good measure of the quality of the page. Oddly, Google managed to patent this obvious idea. This is why they dominated all other search engines.
2. It should be possible for someone to display ads just by putting a nugget of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) on his web pages where he wants the ads to occur, then let someone else handle selling the space, selecting suitable ads for each page, collecting the revenue, and preparing the ads. By making this duck simple, Google was able to sell ad space in every niche imaginable. Further, they cleverly select the ads to be of interest to the readers of the page where they appear so that the ads are usually useful and interesting rather than annoying. Unfortunately, from the advertiser’s point of view, it is quite complicated, requiring bidding on prime space. The advertiser pays per click, rather than per impression or per sale.

Google is a fairly well behaved company given the huge temptation it has knowing so much about what everyone is doing. When the founders lose control of the company, Google will likely become extremely evil. My current complaint with them is they have a short attention span, probably a side effect of the youth of its employees. They come up with an interesting concept, develop a proof of concept, turn it loose on the public, then abandon it. They don’t properly finish, support or polish their works.

Custom Search API

Google obfuscates its searches by returning spaghetti JavaScript instead of search results. This makes it difficult to automate searches. You are supposed to use the Custom Search API which lets you receive results is JSON (Java Script Object Notation) or Atom format. The catch is, you may only do 100 searches per day. If you need more, you must pay for them $5 per 1000 queries.