How To Use Google Advanced Search

Nearly 17 billion explicit core U.S. searches were conducted in January of 2011 alone. Google Sites ranked first with 11.1 billion searches. Source – comScore. It is the worldwide defacto information gathering and retrieval source. We depend on it for our day to day Pittsburgh Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization work.

Google has provided us with an even better way to retrieve information - Advanced Search. We believe that increasing your efficiency with these techniques for acquiring more targeted and therefore better information will serve you well. Whether  your looking for a favorite song from days gone by or an electrician, Advanced Search can help.

To help you explore Google’s Advanced Search we have provided links to the specific sections along the way for you to follow along and try your own Advanced Searches, so let’s get on with it.

The Google Advanced Search Link

As the image shows, navigating to the Google Homepage and looking just to the right of the Search box appears a diminutive link with a whole world of possibilities behind it. So click it. Click this Google Advanced Search Link if you don't see it on the Google homepage.

The Google Advanced Search Query Page

Google Advanced Search Options page

You should now see the above image. The Google Advanced Search interface customizes your queries to the Google Index for you. This is very powerful for refining your search to provide the most topical and relevant information. It does this by using human questions not Boolean operators, so it in effect teaches you advanced operators as you go. This is very cool and extremely powerful.

Google Advanced Search in Action – Constructing Your Query

In this section we’ll walk you through some of the advanced options and give you some insight into how to harness the power of the Advanced Search operators.  For the purpose of this post we’re going to target a topic we know well – Google Advanced Search.

Entering the search phrase Google Advanced Search into the this exact wording or phrase box adds quotation marks around the query. It’s no surprise that this effectively matches Google’s best results for the exact phrase you entered.

TIP about the Tip Links - In addition you can click any of the tip links to the right of the query boxes in Advanced Search to learn how to do advanced searches in standard search.

Google Advanced Search Screen Results

Advanced search also builds your query in the box above at the top of the Advanced Search screen. This will come in handy when we enter our custom queries into our How to use Google Alerts Post which is coming very soon.

Some other queries on the Advanced Search page are:

• Using the OR operator by selecting to enter your query into the one or more of these words query box.
• Searching without specific words using the Don’t show pages that have any of these unwanted words query box.
• Searching within a certain file type using the File Type query box can be very helpful for digging through resource material.

Additional posts on Advanced Search Operations and Operators can be found amazingly by doing an Advanced Search and selecting the Advanced reading level option.

Google Advanced Search Operations and Operators

Additional Advanced Search Options

An additional section also appears in a link at the bottom of the Advanced Search page; the date, usage rights, numeric range, and more link. See the results below when the plus sign is clicked.

Additional Date Usage Rights Numeric Range and More

We use the date option frequently to get the most current results about a given topic and excluding old and outdated information. Other helpful information resides here so it is important to mention.

Using Google Advanced Search can give you Creative and Competitive Intelligence that would have taken hours to sift through. Learning to use these free tools from Google can enhance your effectiveness at your job or speed up your personal search experience. We hope you enjoyed this post. Please leave us a comment about your own experiences with Google Advanced Search.

How to Compete Against Nefarious Companies and Make Search Better

PT Barnum once said, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.” This goes for online marketing as well these days. When companies engage in questionable business tactics they seem to be rewarded. So much for the warm fuzzy tones sounded by the folks looking to provide a “better search experience.” I’m not talking about content farms, link salespeople that flood the net and our emails with links for sale, purple bingo slippers link folks, or the rogue SEO with a link funnel that could stretch to the moon and back. I’m talking real life goods and service industries.

Let me state for the record that I am a Pittsburgh Online Marketing Technologist for a small company. I have a client who shall remain nameless. (You’ll see why in a minute) His business competes in a fairly rough market segment. Folks without a clue; but with deep pockets to throw at shady “get me to the top, I don’t care how” practices. It seems they have come upon a great PT Barnum scheme. Just rob people, cybersquat competitors domains (lawsuit settled and sealed), overcharge customers (reviews manipulated to shield the SE’s), acquire 300,000 links (none of which were bought I’m sure) sweep it all under the rug of relentless TV and YouTube campaigns and Walla; a formula for success?

Then after the dust settles… the dust is still settling in fact. They get caught. So the newspapers promote them with digital and print mentions. They get links from major news and publication channels and their rankings skyrocket with the kind of promotion that NY biz got and that they couldn’t buy for a million bucks like this . So they use their increased sales to buy more ad space to promote their business on local TV and the net. Soon it’s a barrage that my client, remember my client?... can’t compete against with tactics like good customer service and solid professionalism.

The best analogy I can give you is a movie from the 70’s called “Used Cars”. If you’ve seen it, you have got the picture. If you haven’t, check it out. It’s funny as the day is long. I did some link analysis to find the most frustrating stats. As I suspected, links and mentions from top news services with anchor text like ***** Lawsuit and ****** scam that they put up to bury the truth from the consumer. Links my client can’t get and wouldn’t want. So what’s my point?

The SE’s reward bad press and publicity. Barnum was right.

The online customer doesn’t see the companies’ link profile. Most hardly research a business. They just call the first one on the list to fill a need. Because of the fuzzy search experience mentioned previously, there is a level of trust. By the way, I really do have to thank this competitor for waking me up and angering me all the same. I seem to perform better under duress. The short answer then becomes work harder, more efficiently and find new creative ways to leverage my clients’ strengths.

I am looking at something that needs fixed with the algorithm to evolve Search and bring it to the credibility that will assure it’s survival as a viable option for consumers. TRUST.

An ancillary benefit is that we will hopefully all still have jobs. So what needs fixed?

LINKS:

Obviously the rankings need some help determining which links should pass juice and how much juice they should pass.  Any recent link buying News ring a bell? Should lawsuits and bad press pass juice? Should they pass the same juice a piece of good content does? How do the search engines determine sentiment? Are they trying?

REVIEWS:

In my opinion, this is totally broken. Our experience is that a consumer must be polarized to leave a review i.e. the review is either awesome or horrible. If the service provided is professional and the customer got just what they ordered, they don’t take the time to leave a review. Padded review statistics push the nefarious to the top. I hear rumors in the wind that Google is addressing this but we’ll all have to wait and see after the Décor deal. This article mentions Google’s review solution in the works. We’ll see.

COMMENTS:

Comments have been manipulated for years to get links. What determines a quality comment? Are Nofollows enough? Bot registration and “Nice Post” comments for a link get old. If Akismet says it’s spam it’s spam, we don’t have the time to track down every comment. So it’s broken.

PRESS and NEWS:

Can we educate the news community as to the detriment of giving mentions and links to derogatory stories? I saw a story on the local news about the company in question immediately followed by their ad. Maybe the News should do an exposé about how they perpetuate and support companies like this?

If you’re reading this you’re probably involved in the search field in some way or trying to be a more informed consumer. SEO and Online Marketing have had a black eye for some time in the eyes of the public. I read a lot of posts about our community being slick and hucksterish, well let’s start from the ground up and prove the naysayers wrong. I’ll do my part in Making Search Better one link, review, or comment at a time.

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