20 Great Secrets of Google

Top 20 great secrets of google

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1306756,00.asp

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Google is clearly the best general-purpose search engine on the Web (see

www.pcmag.com/searchengines

But most people don't use it to its best advantage. Do you just plug in a keyword or two and hope for the best? That may be the quickest way to search, but with more than 3 billion pages in Google's index, it's still a struggle to pare results to a manageable number.

But Google is an remarkably powerful tool that can ease and enhance your Internet exploration. Google's search options go beyond simple keywords, the Web, and even its own programmers. Let's look at some of Google's lesser-known options.

Syntax Search Tricks

Using a special syntax is a way to tell Google that you want to restrict your searches to certain elements or characteristics of Web pages. Google has a fairly complete list of its syntax elements at

www.google.com/help/operators.html

. Here are some advanced operators that can help narrow down your search results.

Intitle: at the beginning of a query word or phrase (intitle:"Three Blind Mice") restricts your search results to just the titles of Web pages.

Intext: does the opposite of intitle:, searching only the body text, ignoring titles, links, and so forth. Intext: is perfect when what you're searching for might commonly appear in URLs. If you're looking for the term HTML, for example, and you don't want to get results such as

www.mysite.com/index.html

, you can enter intext:html.

Link: lets you see which pages are linking to your Web page or to another page you're interested in. For example, try typing in

link:http://www.pcmag.com


Try using site: (which restricts results to top-level domains) with intitle: to find certain types of pages. For example, get scholarly pages about Mark Twain by searching for intitle:"Mark Twain"site:edu. Experiment with mixing various elements; you'll develop several strategies for finding the stuff you want more effectively. The site: command is very helpful as an alternative to the mediocre search engines built into many sites.

Swiss Army Google

Google has a number of services that can help you accomplish tasks you may never have thought to use Google for. For example, the new calculator feature

(www.google.com/help/features.html#calculator)

lets you do both math and a variety of conversions from the search box. For extra fun, try the query "Answer to life the universe and everything."

Let Google help you figure out whether you've got the right spelling—and the right word—for your search. Enter a misspelled word or phrase into the query box (try "thre blund mise") and Google may suggest a proper spelling. This doesn't always succeed; it works best when the word you're searching for can be found in a dictionary. Once you search for a properly spelled word, look at the results page, which repeats your query. (If you're searching for "three blind mice," underneath the search window will appear a statement such as Searched the web for "three blind mice.") You'll discover that you can click on each word in your search phrase and get a definition from a dictionary.

Suppose you want to contact someone and don't have his phone number handy. Google can help you with that, too. Just enter a name, city, and state. (The city is optional, but you must enter a state.) If a phone number matches the listing, you'll see it at the top of the search results along with a map link to the address. If you'd rather restrict your results, use rphonebook: for residential listings or bphonebook: for business listings. If you'd rather use a search form for business phone listings, try Yellow Search

(www.buzztoolbox.com/google/yellowsearch.shtml).




Extended Googling

Google offers several services that give you a head start in focusing your search. Google Groups

(http://groups.google.com)

indexes literally millions of messages from decades of discussion on Usenet. Google even helps you with your shopping via two tools: Froogle
CODE
(http://froogle.google.com),

which indexes products from online stores, and Google Catalogs
CODE
(http://catalogs.google.com),

which features products from more 6,000 paper catalogs in a searchable index. And this only scratches the surface. You can get a complete list of Google's tools and services at

www.google.com/options/index.html

You're probably used to using Google in your browser. But have you ever thought of using Google outside your browser?

Google Alert

(www.googlealert.com)

monitors your search terms and e-mails you information about new additions to Google's Web index. (Google Alert is not affiliated with Google; it uses Google's Web services API to perform its searches.) If you're more interested in news stories than general Web content, check out the beta version of Google News Alerts

(www.google.com/newsalerts).

This service (which is affiliated with Google) will monitor up to 50 news queries per e-mail address and send you information about news stories that match your query. (Hint: Use the intitle: and source: syntax elements with Google News to limit the number of alerts you get.)

Google on the telephone? Yup. This service is brought to you by the folks at Google Labs

(http://labs.google.com),

a place for experimental Google ideas and features (which may come and go, so what's there at this writing might not be there when you decide to check it out). With Google Voice Search

(http://labs1.google.com/gvs.html),

you dial the Voice Search phone number, speak your keywords, and then click on the indicated link. Every time you say a new search term, the results page will refresh with your new query (you must have JavaScript enabled for this to work). Remember, this service is still in an experimental phase, so don't expect 100 percent success.

In 2002, Google released the Google API (application programming interface), a way for programmers to access Google's search engine results without violating the Google Terms of Service. A lot of people have created useful (and occasionally not-so-useful but interesting) applications not available from Google itself, such as Google Alert. For many applications, you'll need an API key, which is available free from
CODE
www.google.com/apis

. See the figures for two more examples, and visit

www.pcmag.com/solutions

for more.

Thanks to its many different search properties, Google goes far beyond a regular search engine. Give the tricks in this article a try. You'll be amazed at how many different ways Google can improve your Internet searching.


Online Extra: More Google Tips


Here are a few more clever ways to tweak your Google searches.

Search Within a Timeframe

Daterange: (start date–end date). You can restrict your searches to pages that were indexed within a certain time period. Daterange: searches by when Google indexed a page, not when the page itself was created. This operator can help you ensure that results will have fresh content (by using recent dates), or you can use it to avoid a topic's current-news blizzard and concentrate only on older results. Daterange: is actually more useful if you go elsewhere to take advantage of it, because daterange: requires Julian dates, not standard Gregorian dates. You can find converters on the Web (such as

CODE
http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/JulianDate.html

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), but an easier way is to do a Google daterange: search by filling in a form at

www.researchbuzz.com/toolbox/goofresh.shtml or www.faganfinder.com/engines/google.shtml

. If one special syntax element is good, two must be better, right? Sometimes. Though some operators can't be mixed (you can't use the link: operator with anything else) many can be, quickly narrowing your results to a less overwhelming number.

More Google API Applications

Staggernation.com offers three tools based on the Google API. The Google API Web Search by Host (GAWSH) lists the Web hosts of the results for a given query

(www.staggernation.com/gawsh/).

When you click on the triangle next to each host, you get a list of results for that host. The Google API Relation Browsing Outliner (GARBO) is a little more complicated: You enter a URL and choose whether you want pages that related to the URL or linked to the URL

(www.staggernation.com/garbo/).


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10 Secrets to Marketing with Social News Sites - Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and more

PR used to mean you did a lot of hard work with a very small number of people (writers and editorial staff)who had a huge amount of control over what was published or broadcast.  But now a lot of marketing and PR for both online and offline businesses takes place on the Internet, and increasingly on "social news" sites, which are sites that allow their users to submit news stories and vote on them.  The theory behind this is that the world at large can do a better job figuring out what news people want to read than a couple editors can.  My personal experience is that these sites tend to devolve into a lowest common denominator of stories about celebrities and animal costumes, but nonetheless they are important to build links and traffic for your website in today's world.  With some simple tips, you can exploit these websites for your benefit.  For a great overview of these social news sites, their audiences and more, see this TechCrunch article Towards a Better Digg, and also see the end of this article which lists the major social news sites and some key statistics from Website Grader about each of them.

So, here are my Secrets to Marketing with Social News Sites:

1) Great headline required.  You need a great headline to make your story stand out from all the rest of the others on the page to engage the other readers on the social news sites.  The headline needs to be less factual and more enticing, sometimes mysterious.  Think about what will make it most likely someone will click through to your article, usually telling them too much is a mistake.  A great resource for creating good headlines is Copyblogger, he has 2 articles on this topic: 10 Sure-Fire Headline Formats that Work and 7 More Sure-Fire Headline Templates that Work. You can see I took one of his headline templates for this article.

2) Get your friends to help.  While there are lots of posted rules about not "spamming" these sites, there is nothing wrong with emailing a link to your new story or blog article to your friends and asking them to submit it or vote for it if they like it.  This will help you get a few initial votes (it also helps if they vote for your article at the same time, see #4 below).  Plus, if they really are your friends, they probably are interested in what you wrote and will like it.  Don't be shy.

3) Make it easy.  For people who come to your site and read your article, the easier you make it for people to vote on it, the more likely they are to actually vote.  Clicking your mouse once is easy.  Clicking through to another website and then entering some infomation and then voting is not easy.  An example of what I mean are the simple links to Digg this article and vote on Reddit at the top of this article.

4) Timing is everything.  An article that gets 25 votes in 15 minutes will rise very quickly to the top page of most of these sites.  An article that gets 100 votes over two days will not in most cases.  So, not only do you want your friends to vote for your article, you also want them all to vote at the same time, and usually near the time that the article has been submitted.  What this does it helps it rise in the rankings early on. Then if other people on the social news site like it, it will continue to rise or at least remain near the top for a longer time.  Because most people never make it past the first or second page of these social news sites, you need to get to the top of the rankings quickly to have any chance of making it there at all.  If you are on the 4th or 5th page of Digg or Reddit, it is very unlikely you will ever make it very high and get any meaningful traffic.

5) Remember you're buying lottery tickets, not government bonds.  Remember, you are trying something that might work, but might not.  If it does work, it can be extremely valuable.  Being on the front page of Digg or Reddit can mean many thousands of visitors (or more) to your website in a single day, and you will also get a lot more links to your website, which helps you rise higher in search engine rankings.  But, your efforts may not pay off at all.  When marketing to social news sites, you are buying a lottery ticket - the price is low and the chances of winning slim, but the potential payoff is big - not a government bond where the payoff is certain, but much smaller.  So, if it doesn't work the first time, try again and buy another ticket.  It's not too hard.

6) Become an active community member.  It is easy to just submit your own articles to the social news sites and not submit other articles and not vote on other articles.  But you will be more successful if you are at least paritally engaged in these communties since you will gain a better understanding of what the community likes and dislikes.  This will help you be more successful over time.

7) You cannot predict success.  No matter how hard we have tried at Small Business Hub and HubSpot, we cannot predict which articles will be successful and which will not.  I have also not found anyone who can predict this with enough accuracy as to be useful.  My advice is stop trying to predict success (remember, you're buying lotttery tickets) and focus your mental cycles on writing more articles and submitting them.

8) Target the right sites.  Perhaps most important of all, you need to focus on the social news sites where you will have the most success.  There are enough of them around now that you can't really spend time trying to promote you content with all of them.  You need to pick where you think your efforts will have the biggest payoff.  My personal opinion is that the community at Digg is so big and so picky and so focused on a certain topic set (very techie and apple/design stuff) that for most businesses it is not worth doing.  Especially when you are first getting started.

9) Use these stats for each social news site.  These stats give you a sense of the and how valuable the link will be for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.

Social News Site	Alexa Traffic Rank	Google Page Rank
BlinkList	3,571	6
ClipMarks	5,295	6
CoRank	34,757	4
Digg	85	8
Netscape	534	9
Newsvine	3,773	7
OpenServing	187,498	6
Reddit	893	8
Spotback	56,123	5
Spotplex	40,607	0*
StumbleUpon	357	7

* Their site was down when I was researching this article, so I was unable to determine the PageRank.

Also, here are Website Grader reports for each social news site if you want to explore more marketing information about each site:
BlinkList  |  ClipMarks  |  CoRank  |  Digg  |  Netscape  |  Newsvine  |  OpenServing  | Reddit  |  Spotback  |  Spotplex  |  StumbleUpon


10) The best "arbitrage" opportunity is probably Netscape.  Netscape still gets a ton of traffic from the days when they were a regular web portal, which came form the days when everyone used Netscape as a web browser and the default home page was netscape.com and most people did not bother or did not know how to change it.