Googling notes
From Helpful
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(See the references below for google's fairly official guide and an easier reference, respectively.)
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Hints
One of the aspects of using google a little more effectively - without having to think about it too much, even - is to understand its query interpretation enough to play with it.
Refining results, and anticipating used terms, can also be a useful tactic. For example, first thinking of relatively unique terms that all pages I want would use, then start with too general a search and narrow it down.
Note that this means consideration of the results you get. Sometimes it pays to just search and browse around for terms and concepts used on relevant pages, Sometimes it pays to try splitting a search into two more specific searches (in separate tabs) and see where each goes.
OR, ~
I regularly use the OR operator, and recently also ~. These allows you to give flexible alternatives, of which at least one of which has to appear.
Instead of searching for photoshop tutorial you can search for photoshop (tutorial OR guide OR guides OR reference OR help) since google doesn't structurally allow for different word forms (although it is now implementing synsets, which means that guide/guides *is* found).
Used another way: when you search for a character name, consider that people may refer to them by first name and last name, but not always both, so searching for eg. yomiko readman will be a lot more restrictive than yomiko OR readman. This will, of course, result in both more relevant and more unwished results. This is an example for which this works well because both terms are relatively specific.
Note that it can be useful to combine ORs. For example, (ddr OR dance) (mat OR pad) (repair OR fix) will return all the results of the eight searches you could do separately. You also save some sifting through eight similar but not identical result sets.
The tilde (~) operator is an automatic but dumb OR. It essentially resolves a word to an OR-set of its known synonyms or close related terms.
For example, ~ddr will also match 'Dance Dance Revolution' (and also 'RAM'), ~fix will also match 'broken' and 'repair'. So ~ddr ~pad ~fix will also work fairly well.
These synsets aren't reagularly as good as generous OR use, but are a lot simpler; it does make photoshop ~tutorial give better results than photoshop tutorial, which you'd have to admit isn't bad for a single character.
AND queries, their implications
Google does AND searches by default: all search terms have to appear in results.
This makes it pretty easy way to miss a few documents when you actually just want to be thorough. It does not necessarily matter, of course, since when you just want to see a bunch of related, introductory articles, it doesn't matter if a number are not there.
When you want to be sure you see more relevant results, though, you should be aware very specific terms will easily filter out results.
The field of Information Retrieval defines two terms, precision and recall. The first measures how many of the shown documents are relevant, and the second how many actually relevant documents are in the given result set. There is a fairly inherent tradeoff, and it can be useful to steer results towards either a few fairly good ones, or to results that have harder to find things as well as some nonsense.
Other things: The number range, *
The * means 'any word'. This is most useful in a construction like "google * feature" or "* such as *", or a practical example, "like wacom and *".
Google seems to be creative when ignoring words it would normally chuck, which is why you'll get things-between constructions too.
When you remember that there was some very low percentage of people that, say, have a type of color blindness, but you can't remember the name or percentage, you do remember that it had to do with blue, and you don't want to risk filtering out pages that don't spell out 'percent.' A good start would probably be 0..10 (colorblind OR "color blind") blue.
It's not the best example, but it's useful when you approximately remember numbers, or perhaps search for prices.
References
See also
The ability to take a shortcut to google is in Firefox tricks.
