Category Archive

Things change so fast in our profession! Here are the five major elements, that have just changed in Google‘s Boolean search syntax. If you are reading this blog, you will be one of the first people to know. 1. Synonyms in searching. Much to our delight, Google has restored the operator ~ (tilde). You can force Google to search for …

Would you like to see the dates of the search results on Google? By all means, it’s a useful piece of information. If you narrow a Google search to (any) date range, using the drop-down selection for the date range, the dates are shown. You can then also choose to sort by date if you wanted, to see the most recent results first. When a date …

Here is the description of the Boolean operator OR from the Google’s help: OR: If you want to search for pages that may have just one of several words, include OR (capitalized) between the words. Without the OR, your results would typically show only pages that match both terms. Example: world cup location 2014 OR 2018 Many researchers routinely use the operator …

Many of you are familiar with Google’s operator define, useful for a quick lookup of an unfamiliar term. Unlike other operators, define doesn’t need a colon after it; here is an example: define SEO. Google includes a link along with the definition if there’s one specific website it “thinks” provides the best answer. If you are searching for something common, such as Engineering, it provides a …

(This post is about what Google can’t find, with Australia- and NZ- based examples. It should be useful for everyone, no matter where they live.) At the recent Sourcing Summits NZ and Australia I asked the audience to name some cases where web pages would not be found by Google. Examples provided included: “some people are not online” (at all!) and “if I …

Finding social profiles by email addresses have some good applications in Sourcing. Examples are cross-referencing profiles and looking up extra professional information, as well as making several guesses about an unknown email address and finding out which guess is correct. Rapportive does those look-ups; it is one of my favorite tools. Here are some cool features that Google-Plus offers us in …

As the time goes, Google is able to make sense of more information as known objects, or entities, not “just” as keywords. It introduced the “Knowledge Graph” back in 2012 and keeps accumulating recognizable words and phrases in the search, to which it can respond in an intelligent manner, understanding its meaning, semantically. Google is implementing a very reasonable solution …

This post is just to share something quite interesting that I have noticed while using Google search. (This is not a “sourcing tip” type of post.) I am curious whether anyone has seen this – or any posts about it. It could be that I’ve seen some experimenting on Google’s part, not available across Google search. Here’s what I did. …

Google’s Custom Search Engines (CSE) provide us with a way to access Google’s search index in a focused manner. At the core of the tool is X-Raying; any CSE starts with the identification of the site(s) we would like to narrow our search to, providing a way to hide the Boolean operator site: from the end user. The CSE creation …

  Some of the Yahoo services, including search, seem to be staying unattended lately; its “contacts” have some shaky parts as well. However, some of the Yahoo “contacts” functionality can be used for the purpose of connecting with friends across networks. If you wanted to connect with some of your Facebook friends on other social networks, here is how to …