When you don't find what you're seeking, consider specifying more precisely what you want by using Google's Advanced Search feature. Don't be frightened by the name "Advanced Search"; it's easy to use, and it allows you to select or exclude pages with more precision than Google's standard search box. Click on the Advanced Search link at the right of Google's search box.

or visit www.google.com/advanced_search and fill in the form. The Advanced Search form is automatically filled in with appropriate information from your previous query — if you entered a query just before you clicked on the Advanced Search link. If you searched for a phrase, the phrase appears in the phrase search box. If you restricted your search to a specific site or domain, the domain appears in the domain box.

Filling in the top portion of the Advanced Search form is an easy way to write restricted queries without having to use the " ," +, -, OR notation discussed in the previous section Crafting Your Query.

Advanced Search Find results	Basic Search Example	Basic Search Find results
with all of the words	[ tap dance ]	with all search terms
with the exact phrase	[ "tap dance" ]	with terms in quotes in the specified order only
without the words	[ tap -dance ] [ -tap dance ]	including none of the terms preceded by a -
with at least one of the words	[ tap OR ballet ]	with at least one of the terms adjacent to OR

Let's look at some examples. If you click on the screen shots in this section, you'll be taken to the results of running the corresponding search.

• To find tutorial introductions to Google, specify [ google ] in the top field (find results with all the words), and [ tutorial guide intro introduction ] in the third field (find results with at least one of the words).

  

  Note: Instead of specifying your own synonyms for tutorial, you can instruct Google to suggest its own by using the tilde operator, [ google ~tutorial ] or [ google ~guide ]. See Crafting Your Query.

• Find how to export addresses from a Palm address book to print labels.

  

The next part of the Advanced Search page lets you restrict the types of pages listed in your search results.

Next we'll look at each part of the form. If you want to jump ahead to a particular part, though, choose it from this list:

• Language
• File Format
• Date
• Numeric Range
• Occurrences
• Domain
• Usage Rights
• SafeSearch
• Similar Pages
• Linking Pages

Now a detailed description of each part of the Advanced Search page:

• Language: limit results to pages written in a specific language. For example, find pages in Spanish with recommendations for hotels in Andalucía, Spain.

  

  If you always want only results in a certain language or set of languages, then change your search language in your Google preferences. See the section Customizing Your Results by Using Preferences to learn how to change your Google preferences to modify the way your search results appear.

• File Format: restrict your results to a particular file format, or exclude a format from your results. Choices include:

  File Format	Suffix	Description
  Adobe Acrobat PDF	.pdf	A publishing format commonly used for product manuals and documents of all sorts.
  Adobe PostScript	.ps	A printing format often used for academic papers.
  Microsoft Word	.doc	A common word processing format.
  Microsoft Excel	.xls	A format for spreadsheets.
  Microsoft Powerpoint	.ppt	A format for presentations and slides.
  Rich Text Format	.rtf	A format used to exchange documents between Microsoft Word and other formats.

  Since documents in PDF format tend to be better written than web pages, let's search for documents on estate planning in PDF format.

  

  You can restrict your search to other file formats by using the filetype: search operator, which I will discuss in the section Using Search Operator (Advanced Operators).

• Date: restrict your results to pages that have been updated (created or modified), crawled, and added to Google's index (indexed) in the past three, six, or twelve months. Popular pages that are updated often are crawled and indexed frequently. Note: Any change in the page counts as an update, even a spelling correction.

  This option is useful when searching for timely information such as annual events, specifications for a new model of car or appliance, or what people have been doing lately.

  Recently, scientists reported new findings about the risks and benefits of hormone therapy used by 40% of postmenopausal American women to relieve menopause symptoms. We're more likely to find links to this information by searching only for web pages updated in the last three months.

  

  Visit the Wayback Machine if you want to see what a site looked like months or years ago or if a site is currently inaccessible. The Wayback Machine, also known as the Internet Archive, maintains a digital library of snapshots of many Internet sites.

• Numeric Range: when you want pages containing numbers in a specified range.

  Since I'm interested in a "half-bicycle" trailer for my young twins, let's search for one called Trail-a-Bike in the price range $50-$1000.

  

• Occurrences: specify where your search terms must occur on the page. Choices are anywhere on the page, in the title, in the text, in the URL, or in links to the page.

  The title of a webpage is usually displayed at the top of the browser window and in the first line of Google's search results for a page. The author of a website specifies the title of a page with the HTML TITLE element. There's only one title in a webpage.

  The Uniform Resource Locator, more commonly known as URL, is the address that specifies the location of a file on the Internet.

  The link is the text on a page that is linked to another web page or a different place on the current page. When you click on the link, you will be taken to the page or place on the page to which it is linked.

  Find pages on Google whose URL contains FAQ, an abbreviation for either Frequently Asked Questions or Frequently Answered Question. In the solution below I look for pages containing both Google and FAQ in the URL.

  

• Domain: search only a specific website (e.g., www.eff.org) or domain (e.g., .org) or exclude that site or domain completely from your search. The section Anatomy of a Web Address, later in this page, explains how to find the website or domain for a web page if you know its address.

  Let's look at a couple of examples. If you click on the screen shots in this section, you'll be taken to the Advanced Search form specifying the corresponding search.

  Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google's founders, were graduate students at Stanford when they wrote a paper describing their prototype search engine. Let's search for it by entering their names and restricting our search domain to Stanford University's site, stanford.edu.

  

  To find information on volunteering for an organization, search for results with the word "volunteering" and restrict the domain to ."org."

  

• Usage Rights: for pages covered by the Creative Commons license, specify what types of usage the page should allow.

  In general — unless a page states otherwise — it's safe to assume that pages you find with Google cannot be freely used in any way you like. However, some pages have special marking to tell search engines such as Google that the page is covered by the Creative Commons license — and what types of usage are permitted. The Usage Rights search finds these specially-marked pages.

  Your choices are:

  Usage Rights	Description
  not filtered by license	standard, unfiltered Google results
  free to use or share	results you can copy or redistribute
  free to use or share, even commercially	results you can copy or redistribute for profit
  free to use share or modify	results you can copy or adapt, as well as redistribute
  free to use, share or modify, even commercially	results you can copy or adapt, as well as redistribute, for profit

  Note that simply finding pages with the Usage Rights search doesn't guarantee your rights. You should check each page to be sure about its usage terms.

  Let's say that you want to build a website with recipes for vegetables. We'll find pages on Google with Usage Rights "free to use, share or modify, even commercially"

  

• SafeSearch: specify whether to filter out sites that contain pornography or explicit sexual content and eliminate them from search results. Be aware that Google's automated filtering doesn't guarantee that you won't be shown offensive content.

  When you turn off SafeSearch filtering and search for non-pornographic content, Google will order your results in a way that adult sites won't be listed prominently. For example, searching for [ breast cancer treatment ] with SafeSearch turned off, you're unlikely to run across sites with provocative images of breasts.

  

  In an effort to return as many useful results as possible, SafeSearch doesn't currently filter out hate speech, anarchy, criminal activity, crude and tasteless material, illegal weapons, bomb making, etc., content that other filtering systems attempt to exclude.

Page-Specific Searches

The Advanced Search form also offers page-specific searches for finding pages similar to a page for which you have a web address (URL) and for finding out what pages link to a particular page.

• To find pages similar to Consumer Reports' web page, fill in the similar page-specific search box and then click on the associated Search button. For a description of how Google determines when pages are similar, see the Similar Pages section in Part II.

  

• Web pages link from one to another. Links are unidirectional; you can follow links from one page to another. You cannot traverse the link the other way around, i.e., go from a page to the pages that link to it. However, Google keeps track of this information and makes it available. When you want to know who links to your website or to someone else's, fill in a web address (URL) in the links page-specific search section of the Advanced Search form. Let's find who links to the Doctors without Borders, aka Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), website www.doctorswithoutborders.org.

  

  The most common users of backward links are webmasters and website publishers who are curious to know what sites link to theirs. People also use them to find out who links to competitors' sites.

Unlike the other fields in the Advanced Search form, the page-specific searches can't be combined with other query terms. Consequently each has its own Search button.

You can easily run these page-specific searches from Google's Toolbar, which is described in the section Making Google Easier with Google Tools.

Instead of going to the Advanced Search form, you can search for a web site by entering its address in the search box and Google returns a link to the website, as well as links to:

• Google's cache of the site
• Web pages that are similar to the site
• Web pages that link to the site
• All Web pages from the site that Google has crawled, listed in PageRank order
• Web pages that contain the URL

For example, to find out about the wonderful reference site www.refdesk.com, enter www.refdesk.com into Google's search box.

Alerts

Once you've refined your Advanced Search, you can watch for changes in the top 20 results by setting up Google Alerts. Google will find and deliver links to new web pages once a week, once a day, or as soon as Google finds them. Simply copy and paste your advanced search query into the search box on the Google Alerts page.

Google Ultimate Interface

If you want to specify what you're looking for with more precision than Google's Advanced Search form offers, try the Google Ultimate Interface, a third-party application available at www.faganfinder.com/google.html. With the Ultimate Interface you can:

• Search with any of Google's search engines, i.e., Web Search or some of the tools in Part III Special Tools.
• Find pages that have been updated between any two specific dates
• Select letters with practically every different kind of diacritical marking, such as umlauts or accent marks, from the keyboard near the bottom of the page.

Michael Fagan developed Google Ultimate Interface when he was a teenager.

If you're not sure of all the types of information that you can search for with Google, check out Soople, www.soople.com/soople_int.php.

Refining a Query

Refining a query means changing or adding to the set of search terms to do a better job of returning the pages you're seeking. Successful researchers frequently enter several queries to find what they're seeking.

The search boxes at the top and bottom of the results page show the query for the current results page. If the query uses special operators that you entered either directly or indirectly through the advanced search form, they will appear in the search box as well. To refine your query, edit what's in the search box and then click the "Google Search" button or hit the ENTER key.

Let's look at a few examples.