Google Tips And Tricks

FSU College of Law Library Basic Legal Research Series Google: Tips and Tricks

To search Google type a word in the search box and click the Google Search Button. If a typo is made or you don’t know how to spell a word Google will suggest alternatives. In this example the search term has been entered as commerical but Google correctly suggests: Did you mean: commercial. You can click on the correction to search the corrected word. When searching multiple terms you do not need to use ‘AND’.

Google will find pages with misspelled words. On this example Google found 134,000 examples of the misspelled commerical, but doing a search on the correctly spelled term returns over 17 million hits. Google will also correct misspelled proper names too.

Very common words or terms might be eliminated from the search. In the search below the I of level I is not searched.

To eliminate a term from the search you can put a minus sign in front of the term. Searching clemency hearings children will return pages that use the terms clemency hearings but which do not include the children.

By adding a plus sign in front of the term you force Google into searching for that term too. Doing a search on trauma care level +I using the plus sign has more targeted results.

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Phrases can be searched by typing it within quotation marks. “OR” can be used to broaden a search and it can be used between phrases, for example: “commercial law” OR “immigration law.” The “OR” should be uppercase. A very useful feature of Google is the ability to limit a search by the domain. For example: the Law Library’s web address is: www.law.fsu.edu/library. Of that address www.law.fsu.edu is the domain. You can, for example, limit a Google search of the phrase “business law” to the FSU Law School domain by entering “business law” site:www.law.fsu.edu. It is very important to use the format: site:domain. In the example above the term “terrorism” has been searched on the UN Treaty site. Notice that the first response does in fact come from the untreaty.un.org domain as do all the other responses this search will return.

Google can search foreign words that use letters that are different from those used in English. To get good results these foreign letters should be used. Doing a foreign language search on the German word uberstaatliches using a u as the first letter rather than a ü will get either no results at all or only sources that are misspelled the same way.

To insert a letter like the German u above that includes an umlaut or dieresis you should, on your computer, open Character Map. Most computers will have this installed. On my computer this is under System Tools but the location varies from computer to computer so you might have to hunt for it.

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Note that there are many different foreign fonts that can be inserted in this way.

This is Character Map. When you click on the letter it will become larger. There are two ways to copy this into a search or document. You can click on Select and then click on Copy and then paste it into the search box in Google by either doing Ctrl/v or by clicking on Edit and then Paste. The other way to put the letter into the Google search box or any document is to use the Keystroke. Notice that the Keystroke for ü is Alt+0252. Remember that and go to the document where you want to enter this font. Hold down the Alt key, and using the keypad type 0252. You do not type the +. The plus sign indicates the you hold down the Alt key while you type the number. You must use the keypad and also you must type the 0. (Alt+0252 and Alt+252 are not the same.)

In this search uberstaatliches returned no hits while überstaatliches returned 137. The difference being only the correct use of the German ü.

If your search returns a page in a foreign language Google also has translation tools. You can translate pages into English that are in German, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. This is a machine translation and it is not a perfect translation, but usually adequate for getting a general sense of the content.

Chinese characters can also be searched.

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You can click on Similar pages which will try to match the content of the current selection and find other pages that match that content. Another useful tool is Cached pages. If you cannot get to a page, because the page has been removed or they’re having technical difficulties on the site that hosts the document you can try Cached. Google keeps some old pages in Cached storage. This doesn’t always work but it does some of the time.

You can also click on Advanced Search which will give you a few other search options such as: Language, Date and Occurrences.

It’s not Google, but the Waybackmachine is another good way to find content that has been removed or has become unavailable on the web. It’s at: www.waybackmachine.org

Google Scholar allows you to look for Scholarly literature.

Google Scholar searches: Author:dworkin ronald author:dworkin "law's

Google Book search will search the full text of some books.

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Relevancy

Relevant Items

Retrieved Items

B C

Relevant items retrieved

A

A × 100 % A+ B

Recall is the proportion of relevant documents retrieved by the system.

A × 100 % A+C

Precision is the proportion of retrieved documents that are relevant.

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Google Special Syntax Searches

digital signature (over 23 million hits) “digital signature” (about 31/2 million hits) “digital signature” –processing (over 2 million hits) "digital signature" filetype:doc (you can specifiy pdf, ppt, wpd etc.) inurl:"digital signature" (about 500 hits) "digital signature" site:foldoc.doc.ic.ac.uk (30 hits) inanchor:"digital signature" (almost 100,000 hits) intitle:"digital signature" (about 44,200 hits) intitle:"digital signature" inanchor:legislation (77 hits) intitle:"digital signature" inurl:legislation (8 hits) intitle:"digital signature" inurl:law (about 60 hits) "digital signature" inurl:legislation (about 400 hits) "digital signature" site:edu (about 130,000 hits) "digital signature" security site:edu (about 90,000 hits) "digital signature" site:www.law.fsu.edu (6 hits)

******** argentina site:www.oas.org (about 60,000 hits) argentina site:www.oas.org inurl:www.oas.org/juridico (about 9,100 hits) argentina site:www.oas.org inurl:www.oas.org/juridico/Spanish (about 500 hits) ******** terrorism site:untreaty.un.org inurl:untreaty.un.org/english/terrorism

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Google used to allow for only 10 word search but that has now been increased to 32 "Inter-American Convention Against the Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms" site:www.oas.org inurl:www.oas.org/juridico/english/treaties (searches to in) "Inter-American Convention * * Illicit Manufacturing * * Trafficking * Firearms" site:www.oas.org inurl:www.oas.org/ juridico/english/treaties (searches to org) "Inter-* Convention * * * Manufacturing * * Trafficking * Firearms" site:www.oas.org inurl:www.oas.org/juridico/ english/treaties (search to English) "Inter-* Convention * * * * * * * * Firearms" site:www.oas.org inurl:www.oas.org/juridico/english/treaties (searches all and still works)

If you want to learn more.

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FSU College of Law Library Basic Legal Research Series Google Labs and More Google labs has some special Google Tools http://labs.google.com/

To use Desktop tools you’ll need to download a small program to your computer. It will index content on your computer. Notice below that it takes sometime to do this.

http://desktop.google.com/

You can disable searching in areas you don’t want indexed, for example, encrypted data like bank records. Prepared by Jon Lutz

There are security concerns. You should not use Desktop Search via a VPN connection for example.

In Google maps, you can search a zip code or address. Zoom by clicking on the + sign. You can also drag a map to new a location by clicking and dragging. http://maps.google.com/

On the right side of the map is a link to Satellite. Click there to view a Satellite image of your location. You can zoom in and out the same way as on a map and you can drag the image too.

Google Local Find local businesses and services on the web: http://local.google.com/ Add a zip code or address and the businesses you want to find.

Google Groups Google Groups is a free online community and discussion group service that offers the Web's most comprehensive archive of Usenet postings (more than a billion messages). We've recently added a number of features that make Google Groups an even more effective way to communicate with groups of people online. http://groups-beta.google.com/

Google Scholar Allows some searching of scholarly resources. http://scholar.google.com/

Google Alerts Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. http://www.google.com/alerts

With Google Alerts you can search many terms in either the News or Web categories or both.

A9 is owned by Amazon but also has a connection with Google and it has some great features. For street level photos click maps.a9.com.

Once you do a search, you can ‘walk’ either way up or down and view images of that street.

Google SMS Google SMS (short message service) allows you to send text message queries over you cell phone and receive text message response. Here are what you can get: Local Business listings Driving directions Movie showtimes To use Google SMS, send your text message to 466-45 or Weather conditions GOOGL on most phones. You should get a response in less then Stock quotes one minute. Quick answers You can get more information on Google SMS at: Product prices http://www.google.com/sms/ Dictionary definitions

Google Analytics provides web data on how your visitors found you and how they intereact with your site. http://www.google.com/analytics/

Ride Finder:

Google Suggests:

Find a taxi: http://labs.google.com/ridefinder

As you type your search, Google offers keyword suggestions in real time: http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en

Google Personalized To view personalized results, first create a profile of your interests: http://labs.google.com/personalized Google Sets: Enter a few items from a set of things. Next, press Large Set or Small Set and we'll try to predict other items in the set: http://labs.google.com/sets Google Glossary: In the Google search box enter the word “define” and then the word you want a definition for. Google News http://news.google.com/

Google Web Accelerator: Accelerates the loading of Web: pages:http://webaccelerator.google.com/

Google Video Search TV shows and video http://video.google.com/

Google Images The most comprehensive image search on the web. http://www.google.com/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi&q= Froogle froo·gle (fru'gal) n. Smart shopping through Google: http://froogle.google.com/

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