Archive for July, 2008

Here is the continuation from yesterday post on Googling a person Part I. Yesterday I’ve talked about Google yourself which is called egosurfing. So doing a simple search on yourself is fun, and makes you realise that how much information has been leaked out. These days, any person who blogs or social netowrking i.e friendster, facebook or even message boards will leak their information to the public and with google you or anyone else can easily retrieve those information with few stroke of words in Google and in a blink of an eye and then the next eye will get you the information that you need. So bare in mind that the basic idea here is that information is preserved in the the web. Bits and chunks of your information is scattered around the servers meant to be access by anyone. You can make send those chunks of information and also to further help you refine your search. The key thing here is that information links, each peace of information are linked to each other in a logical and understandable manner

Lets start with basic googling technique.

Google does detect order of your search term. This means that search result for the term “Roger taken by alien” is NOT EQUAL to “Alien taken by Roger” (but there some type of search does not care about the order)

With Google you can use this this two very important character that determines your success in googling a person’s info that is a simple “+” plus and “-” minus symbol. You can you this two symbol to make your search more granular and fine tuned for your needs.

“+” plus symbol
When added in front of the search term this forces the search to return all result with the term specified.
i.e +book +car +food will return you result that must have book care and food in it

“-” minus symbol
When added in front of the search term this forces the search result not to return result that have term specified
i.e -book -car will return you result that has no book and car

Quoting a sentence
By quoting sentence you’ll search for result that contain exact of the quoted sentence
i.e “Book that talk” will return all result that has the exact sentence

So by using simple symbol you can fine tune your search result. You can do a combination of the 3 symbol shown above and fine tune your result.

Example:
i would like to search for a dog named doggy so i typed in search term a dog named doggy and returns me all the result that has dog OR named OR doggy.
So i want to fine tune my result and i use the plus symbol +dog +named +doggy and i’ve got better result that must contain all the term dog named doggy in it
But i see there is some result about books and about restaurant so i can further fine tune the search result by using the minus symbol and keyed in +dog +named +doggy -restaurant -book and i get the desired search result
I can still futher fine tune my search term and to ensure that i get my result about the dog named doggy by using the combination of all the above +dog +”named doggy” -restaurant -book and there you go i got my result

So there you go the simple 3 easy to use symbol that you can fine tune your search for desired result. typically i only use the quote and the minus symbol for filtering the result.

There are still a lot of keywords and symbols that you can use in Google search but I’ll leave it for the future post.