China DOS Union

13. Other outstanding features of GOOGLE

13.1. Integrated toolbar

For the convenience of search users, GOOGLE provides a toolbar integrated into the browser, so users can enter keywords directly in the toolbar to search without opening the GOOGLE homepage. In addition, the toolbar provides many other functions, such as displaying a page's PageRank. The most convenient thing is that users can quickly switch among the GOOGLE homepage, directory service, newsgroup search, advanced search, and search preferences. To install the GOOGLE toolbar, visit “http://toolbar.google.com/” and follow the prompts on the page to download and install it automatically. However, the GOOGLE toolbar currently supports only IE5.0 and above.

For people who search the Internet frequently, the GOOGLE toolbar really is a must-have!!

13.2. English definitions of words

When writing in English, the most troublesome thing is being unsure about how to use a certain English word. Now with GOOGLE, everything is easily solved! Whether you want to look up the meaning of an unfamiliar word or understand the usage of a certain word, you can use the online dictionary.

Go to the English GOOGLE and enter the word you want to look up. For example, I want to check the usage of suggest. The result is as follows: “Searched the web for suggest. Results 1 - 10 of about 8,000,000. Search took 0.08 seconds. ”Notice that in the sentence above, there is an underline under the word suggest. Click that link, and it jumps to another site, “http://www.dictionary.com/”; GOOGLE has already submitted the word to that site's query script. Just look at the detailed explanation provided by that site.

13.3. Web page translation

You may understand English, but that doesn't mean you understand German, French, or Latin. What if the pages you find are in those languages? Hehe, GOOGLE provides web page translation!! Although it currently supports only a limited range of Latin, French, Spanish, German, and Portuguese, I still have to admit that this is an outstanding feature.

Try this search: “big bang site:fr”. This means looking for French web pages about the Big Bang. Look at the first result:

The Big Bang Website -
... A propos de Big Bang. Le dernier numéro en date. Les anciens numéros. Autres
activités. Concerts progressifs en France. Emissions de radio. Liens.
perso.club-internet.fr/calyx/bigbang/ - 3k - Cached - Similar pages

A bit dizzying. No problem—click the “Translate this page” button. Look at the result again: hmm, you can roughly make sense of it. It turns out this is a site for a band called “big bang,” unrelated to the Big Bang...

Machine translation is a very cutting-edge artificial intelligence topic. It's impossible to expect the translated result to compare with content specially written in English. But translation among Western languages is much, much better than Chinese-English machine translation. At least you can understand it.

13.4. Search result filtering

There is a vast sea of adult content on the Internet, and many sites are deceptive or have other bad intentions, so users can easily fall into their traps. For this reason, GOOGLE has added an adult-content filtering function. See GOOGLE's preferences page, http://www.google.com/preferences; at the very bottom there is an option called SafeSearch Filtering. However, GOOGLE in Chinese mode does not yet have this function.

14. A preliminary discussion of keyword selection techniques

Keyword selection plays a decisive role in searching. Of all search techniques, keyword selection is the most basic and also the most effective.

Example 1: Find the original passage of the sarcastic remarks by the wine seller in the “Gentlemen's Kingdom” section of Flowers in the Mirror.

Analysis: If you follow the usual line of thought, to find a specific passage in a novel, you would first use a search engine to find the book, then turn to that passage. That certainly works, but the efficiency is very low. If you understand the makeup of the target information, then by using words unique to that information, you can find the material you need very quickly. In other words, efficient search keywords are not necessarily the subject of the target information itself. In the above example, when the wine seller talks about the relationship between the strength and price of wine, the classical particles zhi hu zhe ye are flying everywhere. Therefore, you can use distinctive words to find the target material in one shot.

Search: “wine expensive cheap zhi”, OK, the first result is exactly that passage from Flowers in the Mirror: “Gentlemen, listen: now let us discuss wine and vinegar. Wine is priced cheap, vinegar is priced dear. Why is it cheap? Why is it dear? The true distinction lies in the taste. Wine has a bland taste, therefore it is cheap; vinegar has a rich taste, therefore it is dear. ...”

The above keyword selection technique may be called the “specific-word method.”

Example 2: In the expression “yellow-flower maiden,” what does “yellow flower” mean?

Analysis: “Yellow-flower maiden” is an established expression. If you use only “yellow-flower maiden
yellow flower” as the keywords, the search results will be overwhelming and of little value, so you must add more keywords to narrow them down. What keywords should you choose? Candidates include “meaning,” “definition,” “origin,” “derivation,” “allusion,” “source,” “background,” and so on. One can guess that this kind of material should appear in explanatory writing on folk customs, so words such as “origin,” “derivation,” and “source” are more likely to occur.

Search: “yellow-flower maiden yellow flower
origin”, and you find that “yellow flower” originally comes from Taiping Yulan, and is related to Princess Shouyang of the Southern Dynasties. If you want first-hand material, then search for “Taiping Yulan Princess Shouyang”.

The above keyword selection technique may be called the “synonym method.”

Example 3: What is Comrade Andy Lau's chest measurement?

Analysis: First let me say that some MM asked me to do this search; I'm just using it as a search case, with no other meaning. The most direct search would be “Andy Lau chest measurement”, but in fact the results are full of gossip news such as “Andy Lau jokes that Karen Mok's chest is too small,” and you can't quickly get the information you need. What we can infer is that the desired information should appear in a comprehensive profile of Andy Lau; besides chest measurement, it should also include height, weight, birthday, and a whole series of related information. OK, then you can add other limiting keywords to narrow the search range.

Search: “Andy Lau chest measurement
height”, and something unexpected happens: the wildly popular Pizi Cai novel First Intimate Contact actually contains such keywords online—A-Tai's “perverted parody song adapted from Andy Lau's ‘Forget Love Potion’” and “using height, weight, measurements, and birthday for numbering.” Easy enough: exclude that novel—“Andy Lau chest measurement height -A-Tai”, OK, the result comes out: Wah Jai's chest measurement is 84cm. Let me explain why I used “A-Tai” instead of “First Intimate Contact”: because when the novel is reposted, its title may change, but the names of the characters in it will not.

The above keyword selection technique may be called the “related-word method.”

15. Common search cases

15.1. Finding people

Analysis: The information a person usually reveals online may include: real name, screen name, gender, age, school graduated from, workplace, nickname, address, telephone number, email address, BP, mobile number, ICQ number, OICQ number, and so on. So if you want to learn something about a classmate you haven't seen in many years, you might as well use the above information as keywords for a search; maybe you'll get a lot out of it.

15.2. Finding software

Analysis 1: The simplest search is of course to directly use the software name and version number as keywords. However, just the software name and target site are obviously not enough, because what you find may be software-related news. You should add another keyword. Since download pages often have prompts like “click here to download” or “download,” you can add “download” as a keyword.
Search: “winzip 8.0 download”
Result: Searched for Chinese (Simplified) pages related to winzip 8.0
download. About 6,670 results. This is 1-10. Search took 0.22 seconds.

Analysis 2: Many sites have dedicated download directories, often named “download”, so you can use the INURL syntax to search these download directories directly.
Search: “winzip 8.0 inurl:download”
Result: Searched for Chinese (Simplified) pages related to winzip 8.0
inurl:download. About 358 results. This is 1-10. Search took 0.44 seconds.

Downloading software casually on the Internet is not safe, because the software offered for download may contain viruses or bundled trojans, so restricting the download site is a prudent approach. You can do this with SITE syntax.

After downloading shareware, when you use it, it always pops up warning boxes, or some functions are restricted. Since most Chinese netizens are poor fellows, you should also look for a registration code. To find a registration code, besides the software name and version number, you also need keywords such as “serial
number”, “sn”, and “serial number”. Now let's search for a registration code for winzip8.0.
Search: “winzip 8.0 sn”
Result: Searched the web for winzip 8.0 sn. About 777 results. This is 1-10. Search took 0.30 seconds.

15.3. Finding pictures

Besides the dedicated image search function provided by GOOGLE, you can also combine some search syntax to achieve the purpose of picture searching.

Analysis 1: Dedicated picture collections. Sites that provide pictures usually put them in some dedicated directory, such as “gallary”, “album”, “photo”, “image”, etc. In this way, you can use the INURL syntax to quickly find such directories. Now try looking for a photo collection of Britney Spears.
Search: “"britney spears" inurl:photo”
Result: Searched the web for "britney spears" inurl:photo. About 2,720 results. This is 1-10. Search took 0.23 seconds.

Analysis 2: Web pages that provide picture collections usually indicate in the title bar whose picture collection it is. So you can use the INTITLE syntax to find this kind of page.
Search: “intitle:"britney spears" picture”
Result: Searched the web for intitle:"britney spears" picture. About 317 results. This is 1-10. Search took 0.40 seconds.

Analysis 3: Fans of celebrities often apply for free personal homepages to store nice photos of their idols. So using SITE syntax to specify such a free homepage host is a quick way to find pictures.
Search: “"britney spears" site:geocities.com”
Result: Searched within geocities.com for pages related to "britney spears". About 5,020 results. This is 1-10. Search took 0.47 seconds.

15.4. Finding MP3s

Analysis 1: Sites that provide MP3s usually create a directory called MP3, with various MP3 songs stored under it by category. Therefore, you can use the INURL syntax to quickly find such directories. Now use this method to look for the old song “say
you say me”.
Search: “"say you say me" inurl:mp3”
Result: Searched the web for inurl:mp3 "say you say me". About 155 results. This is 1-10. Search took 0.17 seconds.

Analysis 2: You can also find this kind of MP3-providing page through web page titles.
Search: “"say you say me" intitle:mp3”
Result: Searched the web for "say you say me" intitle:mp3. About 178 results. This is 1-10. Search took 0.73 seconds.

Of course, if you know that a certain site has fast download speed and a complete collection of songs, you can use SITE syntax to check whether it has the target song first.

15.5. Finding books

Analysis 1: As far as I'm concerned, there are only a few e-library sites I visit often, for example the literature site “www.shuku.net”. So with SITE syntax, you can very easily find a certain book there (if that site has it). For example, “Old Book of Tang site:shuku.net” will immediately find the book. If it isn't there, then usually it's also hard to find on other sites. Therefore, the key to finding books is knowing a large batch of famous library sites.

Analysis 2: The first keyword selection technique I introduced above, the specific-word method, is also extremely useful for quickly finding a certain book or article, though of course this has to be based on your having already read the book and having some impression of its contents. For example, if you know the rough content of Don Quixote fighting windmills, you can use “Don Quixote windmill Sancho” to quickly find the book.

16. GOOGLE Search FAQ

Q: How can I get a comprehensive understanding of google.com?
A: Check the relevant site page at “http://www.google.com/about.html”.

Q: How do I switch the initial language interface of google.com?
A: Click “Preferences” on the right side of the search bar, choose the language you want under “Interface Language”, then click the “Save Preferences” button at the very bottom. One thing to note is that GOOGLE uses cookies to record this preference, so if you turn off your browser's cookie function, you won't be able to save the setting.

Q: How do I set the number of search results displayed per page?
A: Same as above: go into Preferences, and on that page choose the number of results under “Number of Results”. The larger the number, the longer it takes to display the results. The default is 10 items.

Q: What should I do if a link in the search results won't open?
A: There are many reasons a link won't open, for example the site may be down, or the page may already be dead, and so on. You can click GOOGLE's “Cached” to view the page cache on GOOGLE's server. However, if that page is filtered by the local ISP, then even the server cache still won't open. The only solution is to use a proxy server, then enter the link's IP address in the URL bar.

Q: I open a search result link, but the page is too large, and it's hard to quickly find the information I want. What should I do?
A: Open “Cached” directly. GOOGLE will mark the keywords in different colors, making them easy to find.

Q: When I click each search result, I want it to pop up in a separate window. What should I do?
A: Go into the “Preferences” page. Note that near the bottom there is a “Result Window” item. Check the box for “Open search results in a new browser window”, then save the setting.

17. Postscript

Version 3.0 of this little article has finally been updated, and I can finally let out a sigh of relief. My original intention and motivation for writing this introductory article on searching was that Internet search engines made work and study easier and more interesting for me and my friends, and I think more people should share this pleasure. It should be mentioned that the continuation and updating of this little article owed a great deal to the strong help and encouragement of the Sina netizen “Search Engine 9238”. Without his enthusiastic advice, I think this article would have been much less impressive. I also thank the other netizens who offered help and suggestions. I hope you can continue giving your opinions.

I got something out of this! This post should be moved to the front.

Good post