My Favorite Google Features
Date: Monday July 14, 2008
Time: 7:30 pm
Group: Princeton PC Users Group
Location: Mercer County Library, Lawrenceville, NJ
Website: www.ppcug-nj.org
Program Co-ordinator: Arnold Rosner <arnold_strand at yahoo dot com>
Power Googling: Getting What you Want from Google
Date: Wednesday July 16, 2008
Time: 8:45 - 9:30 am
Group: Mercer County Chamber of Commerce Technology Committee
Location: Mercer Regional Chamber of Commerce
1A Quakerbridge Plaza Drive
Mercerville, NJ 08619
www.mercerchamber.org/contactUs/directions.asp
Website: www.mercerchamber.org/technology/
Program Co-ordinator: Arnold Rosner <arnold_strand at yahoo dot com>
Google is so easy to use, why attend this presentation? If you’re like many people, you use only a small number of Google’s services and features. Learn how to go beyond Google’s deceptively plain interface and take advantage of many shortcuts and underutilized capabilities. For example, get driving directions by entering a US street address into Google’s search box. Need a US Phone number or address? Just enter a company or person’s name and a city, state, or zip code in the standard web search box. Enter a query even if Google’s home page isn’t in your browser from Google’s Toolbar. Personalize your Google home page with weather forecasts, news headlines, traffic reports or other helpful information. If you aren’t sure whether a word is hyphenated, search for it with a hyphen, e.g., [ long-term ]; you’ll get more results. Find synonyms by preceding the term with a ~, which is known as the tilde or synonym operator, e.g., [ google ~guide ] finds guides, tip, help, and tutorials on using Google. Search by example with Google Sets. For a quick summary of some of Google’s features, visit the Google Guide cheat sheet. The more you know about how Google works and its capabilities, the better it can serve your needs.
What Google Can Do For Your Website
How can you get more visitors to your website? Learn how from Nancy Blachman, author and developer of Google Guide, an online tutorial and reference, which over half of its visitors find directly from Google searches.
Nancy Blachman will share her experiences in designing, developing, and promoting Google Guide, www.googleguide.com, which is now the top result for queries including [ Google tutorial ], [ Google guide ], [ using Google ], [ Google stock symbol ], and [ Google favorite features ]. In this presentation, Nancy will cover creating content for your website, linking to search results, getting your site listed in Google, improving your site’s page rank, publicizing and advertising your website and generating revenue from AdSense.
Power Googling: Getting What you Want from Google
Google is easy to use, but the more you know about how it works, its features, its capabilities, and how it displays results, the better it can serve your needs. Learn how to go beyond Google’s deceptively plain interface and take advantage of underutilized capabilities and shortcuts.
In this presentation, Nancy Blachman will show
My Favorite Features
Google is so easy to use, why attend Nancy Blachman’s presentations? If you’re like many people, you use only a small number of Google’s services and features. Learn how to go beyond Google’s deceptively plain interface and take advantage of many shortcuts and underutilized capabilities. For example, get driving directions by entering a US street address into Google’s search box. If you aren’t sure whether a word is hyphenated, search for it with a hyphen, e.g., [ long-term ]; you’ll get more results. Find synonyms by preceding the term with a ~, which is known as the tilde or synonym operator, e.g., [ google ~guide ] finds guides, tips, help, and tutorials on using Google. For a quick summary of some of Google’s features, visit the Google Guide cheat sheet. The more you know about how Google works and its capabilities, the better it can serve your needs.
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Nancy Blachman with Google Guide |
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Nancy Blachman, Developer and author of Google Guide |
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Nancy Blachman, Developer and author of Google Guide |
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Old Google Guide logo |
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How to Do Everything with Google, Co-Authored by Nancy Blachman |
New Google Guide logo:
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]]>I revised this tutorial incorporating the valuable comments and suggestions from many people to whom I am grateful. They include: Rod Adams, Amit Agarwal, Abass Ahmady, Marian Bach, Joe Barker, Penny Barsimantov, Adam Baxter, Joel Biatch, Justin Carroll, Henry Cejtin, Marc de Groot, Jutta Dejener, Philip De Neef, Marie desJardins, Larry Engholm, Tim Farley, Stephen Ferguson, Philip Fire, Gordon Barg, Ahuva Gelblum, Wouter Gerritsma, Johann George, John Glenn, Anita Goldstein, Leora Gregory, Andrew Gumperz, Tim Helck, Tom Hill, Hank Hufnagel, Nancy Jamison, Richard Karpinski, Debra Kaufman, Shauna Kelly, Steve Klein, Stefani Lefebre, Doris Li, Jan Lindner, Dan Lyons, Liz Mabey, Chris Manning, Jane Manning, Sandy McNiven, Katie Miller, Robert Miller, Gwyn Firth Murray, Dave Nagle, Martha Newman, Steve Omohundro, Eric S. Pecoraro, Jerry Peek, Lisa Pons, Kurt Bernhard Pruenner, Abijah Reed, Hamish Reid, Sara Richards, Marlene Rozofsky Rogers, Bob Rosenberg, Kevin Rowe, Janet Sanford, Taly Sharon, Malcolm Slaney, Alex Sokolowski, Romke Soldaat, Stephan Spencer, Paul Spinrad, Brad Templeton, Matt Vance, Linda Walters, Rita Wespi, Dan Whittaker, and Hanna Yap.
I especially thank Tasha Bergson-Michelson of To The Point Research, Earl Crabb, Pauline Facciano, Thomas Galloway, Joy Li, Milton Peek, Naomi Pitcairn, Mark Seiden, and Google Answers researchers (most of whom I know by their handles) Angy-ga, Byrd-ga, Crabcakes-ga, Omnivorous-ga, Serenata-ga, Voila-ga, and Robert Skelton for providing a wealth of advice for making this tutorial more accurate and readable.
Stephan Spencer, president of NetConcepts, suggested moving Google Guide to this WordPress system. Stephan was generous with time and suggestions as we made the move. Our WordPress system depends on plugins developed by volunteer programmers. The plugins include Permalink Redirect, Post Updated, Search Meter, Ultimate Tag Warrior, wbExam, WP-EMail, and WP-Notable.
I thank Fritz Schneider and Eric Fredricksen, with whom I wrote How to Do Everything with Google, for providing me ideas of what to include in this tutorial. I’m also grateful to Matt Vance, author of www.minezone.org for suggesting that I develop a Google Advanced Operator cheat sheet, to Hamish Reid for making Google Guide easier to navigate, and my father, Nelson Blachman, for asking questions that encouraged me to explore and learn more about how Google works and for reviewing numerous drafts. I thank Jerry Peek for joining me on this project.
I thank David desJardins, my husband, for suggesting topics to include, answering my questions, and reviewing early versions of this tutorial. Last, but not least, I thank Louis and Sarah for their big hugs and kisses when I wasn’t working on this Google tutorial.
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]]>If Google Guide is helpful to you, please tell other Google users about it, and if you have a website, please add a link to Google Guide’s home page, www.googleguide.com. Feel free to use the following code, which displays the Google Guide logos, which link to Google Guide’s home page.
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]]>WebTalk Radio, March 20, 2004, 11 am PST
Interview with Nancy Blachman on her favorite Google features
(in Archives area, search for: Nancy Blachman)
Interview by Rob Greenlee
Science News Online, the Weekly Newsmagazine of Science, March 6, 2004
Mining the Tagged Web
By Ivars Peterson
COMPUTERWORLD, Denmark, February 27, 2004
Library Releases Danish Google-guide
By Rikke Sternberg
Palo Alto Weekly, February 25, 2004
Getting good at Google
By Elizabeth White
INTERNET LEGAL RESEARCH WEEKLY , February 8, 2004
Brush up your Google
By Tom Mighell
be Spacific, February 3, 2004
Google How To Guide and Online Tutorial
Internet News, February 2, 2004
New Google Guide
By Gwen
New York Times, February 1, 2004
The Coming Search Wars
By John Markoff
The Pandia Post Newsletter No. 20, February 1, 2004
Searching Google more efficiently
Guardian Unlimited, January 8, 2004
Delivering the goods
By Jack Schofield
Guardian Unlimited, December 18, 2003
Web watch: Google guide
By Jack Schofield
For press releases, visit www.googleguide.com/gg_pr.html.
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GoogleGuide … is the most comprehensive, well-organized, and useful search tutorial I’ve been able to find. |
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| –Justin Keller, Marketing + Consumer Acquisition Manager, ChaCha.com, July 18, 2007 | ||
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This site, which I found by accident, is wonderful. Thank you for creating it. I will be referring my students to your site as a resource to supplement our classroom work on Google features. |
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| –Pramod, Ottawa, April 14, 2007 | ||
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This is a GREAT tutorial. Boy, I have been missing a lot by not knowing all the ways to use Google! Thanks a lot!! |
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| –Dorothy Bullock, April 14, 2007 | ||
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There are a lot of cool Google tips and hacks floating around, some of which I’ve mentioned in my weekly e-column. (For example, you can use Google as a dictionary by typing “define:ersatz,” or whatever.) But here’s a nice, tidy list of all of them in one place, some of which are new to me. Bookmark this baby! |
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| –David Pogue, New York Times technical specialist blog, June 2005 | ||
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Nancy Blachman’s Google Guide is by far the best guide to using Google, for beginners & more intermediate users, that I’ve seen so far. I see great potential here for plopping patrons down with this self-guided tutorial, instead of the 20 minute “This is Google, this is how you search” lecture. |
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| –LibrarianInBlack: resources and discussions for the “tech-librarians-by-default” among us…, Feb 4, 2004 | ||
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The absolutely best tutorial on how to use all of Google’s potential. Easy to use, simple to navigate, this is a little jewel for both the novice and advanced search user. The definitive up-to-date guide on how to best leverage the Google search engine and all of its features in a simple and easy to access format. Recommended. |
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| –Robin Good, Master New Media: What Communication Experts Need to Know, Feb. 21, 2004 | ||
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It might be unofficial, but it’s the best online guide on how to use Google I have ever seen. Pay it a visit. |
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| –Robert Skelton, Google Answers Researcher and developer of SearchEngineZ and Google Fan | ||
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[Google Guide] is easy and intuitive to navigate, enables users of varying skill levels to skip or choose parts of the tutorial at will, and seems very comprehensive, especially with your “new features” page that you keep updated. Do you think Google would put a link to your tutorial on their page? |
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| –Regina R. Monaco, Ph.D. | ||
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Terrific guide to using Google by Nancy Blachman. I especially recommend the sections “interpreting queries” and “evaluating results“. |
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| –Sébastien Paquet, Seb’s Open Research: Pointers and thoughts on the evolution of knowledge sharing and scholarly communication | ||
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The fact that Nancy has been teaching Internet novices is apparent. She takes nothing for granted, and even includes tips on how to navigate a Web page. More savvy users may skip those sections, however, and focus on the practical examples and exercises. She is very thorough, and includes introductions to advanced Boolean searching, as well as many of the additional features available at Google, including everything from Froogle shopping search to the Google toolbar. The site also includes other useful features, like the list of new Google services or features. This page includes direct links to the relevant introduction found at the site. Now, why does she include a tilde (~) in the name of the site? Nancy points out that putting a tilde in front of a search term (with no space in between) effectively turns that term into any of its synonyms: “The tilde is known as the synonym operator. So, if you search for “Google ~Guide,” Google will find Google Guide as well as other Google tutorials.” It is tips like this one that make the Google ~Guide so useful. Yes, you may search Google right away, without reading any introduction or FAQs, but that is like looking at only one of the channels available on your TV or driving your car in the first gear only. |
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| –Pandia: Search Engine News | ||
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While the Google search instruction page is helpful, it’s a rather bare bones approach, and your guide fills in the gaps. … By having this tutorial available, you’ve saved folks lots of time trying to explain the search process. I’m glad your guide is available now and will recommend it to anyone new to the internet. I wish it had been available 5 years ago when I was a newbie. |
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| –voila-ga, Google Answers Researcher | ||
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I adore Google. Period. I use it each time I need to search some stuff on the Net and it turns up the most wondrous results so I was truly happy to know that there is something better than Google … Google Guide! Yep, it teaches you all the tips and tricks … so you’ll be able to search even better! Thank God for Google Guide! |
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| –MayaKirana.com | ||
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Today I came across a really great guide for using Google. If you, or someone you know, has trouble getting good search results, show them this guide. It should really help make their lives better. |
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| –The Infofiend Logs - Fiendish, Feb. 4, 2004 | ||
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GoogleGuide looks like a potentially useful web-based tutorial for teaching students to search with Google… Note that it’s available under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0 license, which means maybe we should rework it as a Google tutorial module … |
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| –Kairosnews: A Weblog for Discussing Thetoric, Technology & Pedagogy, Feb. 5, 2004 | ||
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Great site! You’ve maintained the elegant simplicity of Google’s own site, along with a thorough attention to detail and content. |
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| –sublime1-ga, Google Answers Researcher | ||
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As an experienced user of Google, Google News, Froogle, etc., I was pleased (and surprised) at how much I was able to learn from your excellent Google Guide. |
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| –Robert Spinrad, retired, formerly Senior Scientist, Brookhaven National Laboratory and Vice President, Technology Strategy, Xerox | ||
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Thanks for the tutorial–I was using Google as a flashlight in the big cave of the Internet, and Google Guide turned on the house lights! |
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| –Robert Miller, website designer and filmmaker | ||
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Here are reasons why Google has many users
and why those users frequently search using Google.
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information
and make it universally accessible and useful. While pursuing
this vision, Google has adopted the following philosophy:
For more about Google’s philosophy, visit
www.google.com/corporate/today.html.
Google strives to make it easy to quickly find what you’re
seeking. The following list shows some of the many types of
searches Google can easily do.
Click on the type of information to learn how to search for it
and click on the examples to see the results of such a search.
… [T]he nice thing is that a teacher can feel welcome to modify this tutorial for use with their classes. We need more open content tutorials such as this.