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Google Like a Pro

Birgit Knig

earching with Google can be a magical experience. In seconds, you can tap vast storehouses of information located on servers in virtually every corner of the world. Youre likely to find things that you never suspected existed. Indeed, in mid2008, Google announced that its computers had indexed 1 trillion Web files, or URLs (universal resource locators). Thats also the challenge. If you want this amazing resource to lead you quickly to knowledge you need for problem solvingor even help you recall that old movie star whose name will fill the corner of the crossword puzzleyou must make your queries efficient by learning some advanced searching techniques. Whether you want a quick overview of a topic; a particular fact in a hurry to make a point with a client; to establish some early evidence for an interesting out-of-thebox hypothesis before you set the team to work; or simply to find out if your flight is leaving on time, you need to become something more than your typical Googler. Herewith, a brief guide.

Birgit Knig is a principal in McKinseys Berlin office. Copyright 2008 McKinsey & Company. All rights reserved.
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What Google can and cannot do

In the following pages, we offer some shortcuts that can save you time and trouble by making your searches more useful. Before we start, however, its important to understand what Google can and cannot do. Despite its grand ambition to index all the information in the world, Googles computers can only see what is publicly available on the Internet. That leaves a universe of information that its owners dont want you to see; often they dont even want you to know it exists. Also, Google makes no claims about quality control: It can find all sorts of facts that have been recycled, taken out of context, or made up entirely. Among other tricks, well teach you how to search for information from reliable sources. In general, the best way to get to the information you want, without slogging through pages of irrelevant listings, is to invoke Googles higher-level indexing capabilities. By fine-tuning your searches this way, you can save time and be reasonably sure that you have been as thorough as a do-it-yourself researcher can expect to be. (Again, bear in mind that you are only seeing what is publicly available on the Web; for some tips on finding information on the invisible Web, see the sidebar, Google Mysteries.) We will also describe how to deal with more open-ended querieswhat to do when you are looking for things that you dont know exist, rather than trying to track down information you are sure is there somewhere. Finally, we will show you some of Googles unique time-saving tools for busy travelers.

Making your queries efficient

The most common mistake is to assume that Google knows what we are looking for when we enter general search terms. It doesnt. Googles computers are amazingly thorough and fast, but in their most basic mode (when they are looking for a simple one-word search term), they are not terribly bright: They are looking for any Web page that includes your word with a certain frequency and/or within a specified proximity to the beginning of the file. So single search terms only work well for very specific, narrow topics.

Tip: Use minus signs and quotation marks Among the easiest ways to nar-

row your search are using the minus sign to avoid a specific term and using quotation marks to tell the search engine to look for exactly what appears in quotes. These operators are quite useful if your search term has more than one meaning; Google has no way to intuit which meaning youre looking for, as you will quickly discover when you read through the first few wildly irrelevant hits. For example, if you are looking for swimming pools and type in pool, youll find yourself wading through listings about billiards. Fortunately, this is easy to remedy with the minus sign () syntax, which eliminates the unwanted listings:

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pool-billiard

Search

Result: No billiard sites anymore.

But that may not narrow your search sufficiently. Youll still get pool.com, a Web site that auctions domain names. Heres where quotation marks will help you specify the type of pool youre looking for. If you type the words swimming and pool next to each other without quotes, Google will list sites that have those two terms next to each other, along with files that contain both of those search terms, no matter how far apart they are. However, if you put quotation marks around swimming pool, it becomes the only search term, and Google will find only pages where that combination appears. Using quotation marks is particularly useful if you are searching for an exact phrase. For example, if you were looking for information about Bloomberg terminals, not Mayor Bloomberg or the company Bloomberg LLC, you could use quotation marks to search for a phrase:

bloomberg terminal

Search

Result: "Bloomberg terminal" generates about 50,000 hits; without quotation marks you get more than 230,000.*

Tip: Search for hidden keywords and titles Do you still have several thousand hits? Here it is important to understand that Google indexes all those billions of Web pages by performing a full-text search of every file and retrieving pages where your search term or term combination appears. Google knows only that the words are there, not whether they represent the actual content of the file: the words may appear in a passage about a side topic or only in a footnote.
To exclude irrelevant hits, you can introduce another filter into your search: the keywords that the publisher of the page or a third party has added to generate links to the pagetheyre a way to give search engines and other Web sites signals about what the important content inside the page is. To add this valuable information to your search, use the allinanchor: syntax. This tells Google to search for your term among the key words that appear in what is called anchor text.

* You may not get the same results for these examples when this article appears, due to changes in Web content.

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allinanchor: bloomberg terminal

Search

Result: This gives you about 10,000 fewer hits and more importantly hits with improved content focus.

To get yet more precise, you can restrict your search to the Web page title. This is a tag that Web publishers create to provide precise summary information about the contents of a page, similar to the headline on a news story. When you type intitle: before your search term, Google looks only at the content of the title tag, which is as restrictive as it gets: You will get only the pages whose authors included your search term in the title just for Google to find. This can be quite useful when you are looking for very specific terms, such as the name of a particular product.

intitle: bloomberg terminal

Search

Result: You are down to about 340 hits, all of which have the Bloomberg terminal as their main topic.

Tip: Choose the sources you want Another way to improve the quality and

speed of your results is to specify the type of sources Google should search. You can do this either by going through the various Google sub-sites (Google News, Google Blogs, Google Scholar), which you find on the Google toolbar, or by adding special syntax to your query after the search term. Here are some useful filters: site:edu site:gov site:us site:org inurl:news inurl:blog inurl:forum For example: for material from university sites for government sites for US sites for nonprofits and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) for news sites for blogs for forum discussions

Barack Obama inurl:forum

Search

Result: You nd all the forums that discuss Barack Obama topics.

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As you can imagine, taking a moment to specify the type of source can save you quite a bit of time by winnowing the field of listings. It can also give you more confidence in the reliability of the information. Another filter is by type of file. You can specify the type of files to find by using the filetype: command followed by the filename extension for Word (.doc), Excel (.xls), PowerPoint (.ppt), Adobe PDF (.pdf), and other file types. This is especially useful if what you are looking for is raw data, which is most likely to be found, for instance, in the Excel spreadsheet format.

world economic indicators letype:xls

Search

Result: The very rst entry provides you with International Monetary Fund data in a nicely formatted spreadsheet.

Tip: Limit your search by time period Timeliness is another filter that can narrow your search. This is especially useful when you search for a topic with a long history but what you need is current information. To restrict your search to recently updated sites, you can use the syntax inurl:2008. This lists only those links that have been published in 2008. For instance:
Apple vs Microsoft inurl:2008 Search

Results: This gives you the 2,400 pages published in 2008. Without the inurl:2008 command, the search returns 49,000 pages.

But maybe you are interested in the history of this particular case, which involved Microsofts use of the graphical user interface popularized by the Mac. Another command will tell you when the most information about the case was published. This is the timeline command, view:timeline.

Apple vs Microsoft view:timeline

Search

Result: You get a bar chart depicting the number of posts per year. You can click on a year and zoom in to nd relevant articles and a more detailed timeline.

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Finally, you can combine operators in your commands to gain even greater precision:

allintitle: CO2 emissions site:edu

Search

Result: 26 scholarly sites that have CO2 emissions in the title, among them pages from the Web sites of Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In contrast, a search for CO2 emissions alone returns about 6 million hits to wade through.

Finding something you cant specify

If we only knew exactly what we were looking for! Often, we dont, and we turn to Google for a quick overview of a field, rather than for a specific bit of information. In those situations, we typically know something but certainly not enough to specify a good search term. This is where some of Googles advanced operators come in handy. For example, if you have a keyword to start with, you can learn more by including its synonyms in the search. No need to reach for your thesaurus. Just type a ~ in front of the keyword, and Google will run a comprehensive search based on the term and all its synonyms.

~airplane

Search

Result: You nd sites based on the search terms airplane, plane, air, ight, jet, aircraft and airline.

Another way to improve your odds in an open-ended search is to use the related: command to find other Web sites that contain similar information. For example, if you have been searching for information at the CNN news site and want to find other news sites with similar information, you would type related:cnn.com. This command can also help you get quick insight into what companies appear to be competitors, based on the similarity of their content.

related:www.mckinsey.com

Search

Result: This gives you the home pages of Bain, KPMG, BearingPoint and AT Kearney.

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If you feel adventurous, why not try the wild-card operator (*), essentially a fill in the blank command.

Mckinsey is a *

Search

That wasnt surprising, but this command is very useful. If a client drops a reference into a conversation and its not appropriate to ask for an explanation, jot down the term and type it into Google later. It can save you a lot of trouble. For instance, say you are new to the Firm, and a client talks about his admiration for Dominion, a company you have no knowledge of. Type Dominion is a *. You will quickly learn that it may be a Canadian newspaper, a power company, a theme park, or a freight carrier. It is pretty well certain that one of these is what your client was referring to.

Just the start

These examples only begin to suggest how, with a few simple tools, you can take the frustration out of searching for information on the Web, saving time and getting superior results. Google is much too complex to cover in a few pages, so these examples represent only a personal selection of commands that we have found useful. If you are interested in learning more, try the search term Google hacks, and you will find a wonderful selection of sites dedicated to dissecting Googles search syntax. We focus on Google because it is the most commonly used search engine, but it is not the only search engine available. Some general-purpose competitors, such as Ask.com, display results in a different format and automatically offer suggestions for narrowing or broadening your search. So-called metasearch engines, such as dogpile.com, compile listings from multiple search engines. Several search sites bring a special twist: Clusty, founded by computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon University, offers clusters of related material, and Mahalo.com employs humans to create index pages on topics that can fine-tune your search. For consultants, what may be most useful are vertical search engines, which are associated with specific industries or topics. These sites can get you to relevant results quickly and display listings that would typically be pages down in a Google search.

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Examples include paperpundit.com for the paper industry, ides.com for plastics, and pharmweb.net for pharmaceuticals. When you step beyond Google and try these other tools, you will typically find that you can use search commands similar to the ones described for narrowing a Google search.

Google tools for a life on the road

In its never-ending quest for maximum Internet relevance, Google continues to add handy features. So, for many common questions, Google has incorporated shortcuts that give you the answer directly, without requiring you to click onto the Web site where the information resides. This is especially helpful when working from your BlackBerry.

If youre new to Web surfing from your BlackBerry, heres how to get started: Choose the Internet connection icon, click the wheel, click go to . . . , and type www.google.com. At this point, you may want to bookmark the site. When the search screen appears, we suggest you choose Classic view from the list at the bottom of the Google Mobile page, which will make viewing some of the results, especially the math, easier.

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Lets assume you are about to fly from London to Frankfurt and want to know whether your flight is delayed. Just type in the airline and flight number, and then search. In this example, we typed Lufthansa 4743 and obtained the following information:

Lufthansa 4743

Search

Result: Track status of LH 4743 from London (LHR) to Frankfurt (FRA) 26 Sep 2008 - On schedule Departure 6:25 AM, Arrival 8:55 AM www. ightstats.com

Arrival is in local time, of course. To calculate the flight time, you would need to know the time difference. Google has that covered, too:

frankfurt time

Search

Result:

10:32 am Friday (CEST) - Time in Frankfurt, Germany

You plan to take a cab to the hotel, which the invitation says is about 35 kilometers from the airport, but youve never grasped the metric system. How many miles is that?

35 km in mi

Search

Result:

35 kilometers = 21.7479917 mi

German cab drivers rarely take credit cards, so you will have to get some euros. Whats the current conversion rate from the pound?

Convert 1 pound to euros

Search

Result:

1 British pound = 1.2591582 Euros

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Now that youve loaded up on euros at Heathrow, you think about the day ahead. Youll have quite bit of time to kill before your noon meeting. Maybe you can find that anniversary gift and take in the sights in the old town area. That all depends on the weather, though. You can check the forecast for Frankfurt:

Frankfurt weather

Search

Result:

Weather for Frankfurt, Germany - Add to iGoogle

24 C
Current: Clear Wind: S at 10 km/hr
Fri Sat Sun Mon

What else can Google help you with when youre between laptop connections? It can serve as a virtual calculator, which is especially nice if you have been frustrated by the BlackBerrys hard-to-maneuver and limited arithmetic functions. You just type the term and click search to get the result:

log(100)

Search

Result:

Log(100) = 2

Useful notations include: 2^5 and e^2 for exponents, sin(90) for trigonometry, ln(10) for logarithms, pi for calculations involving circles, and 5! for factorials. For a complete list of math functions, plus links to other handy functions, such as area code lists, go to http://www.google.com/help/features.html.

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Google mysteries
On the Google search page, how does the button Im feeling lucky work? When you make this choice, Google takes you directly to the first search result, bypassing the results page. If you are indeed lucky, youll see your perfect match, without seeing other search results and sponsored links. Who decides which pages to list first? Google uses an algorithm that ranks pages according to the number of times other pages refer to it; a link from page A to page B is interpreted as a vote by A for B. In addition to counting the number of votes, Google also considers who is voting, placing more weight on votes cast by pages that are important (i.e., pages that rate many links themselves). Can you manipulate your page rank? Yes, in principle, thats easy, and sites try it all the time. If you can convince high-ranking pages to link to your page, the algorithm will automatically give your page a higher rank. This has inspired some sites to sell links from their high-ranking pages, which reduces the quality of the search, and Google discourages the practiceincluding by dropping the page rank of sellers caught in the act. Does Google access everything on the Web? No. By some estimates, there is 500 times as much information in the dark or invisible Web as on the surface Web that Google and other search engines have access to. Sometimes sites and pages are hidden because the information is proprietaryas in sites that require a registration or membership (such as the McKinsey intranet). Much of it is in the libraries of academic institutions, which are not open to the spidering software that search engines use. Sometimes owners of Web sites selectively hide pages from public search. You can see the type of pages theyre hiding by typing /robots:txt behind the site address (e.g., www.whitehouse.gov/robots:txt). This gives you a list of file names that have been hidden.

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In the results list from Google, I see a link that looks useful, but when I click on the link, the page is gone. What happened? Probably the page has changed and is no longer available at its original address. You can try to look for the old version in Googles cache, a temporary storage area in a computers memory that holds a snapshot of a Web page to speed up access. Place the command cache: in front of the URL to retrieves the latest cached version of the site (Google will indicate when it was last cached). Your missing link might be there. The busier the site, the less likely you are to find a cached page.