The Search for Power

 

By David Shamah, The Jerusalem Post, Feb. 11, 2005

 

Let's see now. Not having been born with blue blood, I don't qualify to run a kingdom – or even a dukedom. I could run for President, or even Prime Minister, but I like keeping my hands clean. The PTA meetings around here feature a lot of yelling – too political for my taste. And the job of dog catcher is filled, I have just been informed.

 

So what's a megalomaniac to do? Folks – like me, for example – who are control freaks need an outlet on which to impose their will. They want to be in charge, to boss people around, to be in everyone's business as much as possible.

 

Unfortunately for me, all the good bossing people around type jobs are already taken. But I did find a good substitute; if I can't run people's lives, I can manage their information – and find out all the deep, dark secrets they have buried in the recesses of the Internet.

 

Finding out top secret information, of course, is a challenge; but so is finding not too secret information about a myriad of subjects! There are millions – even billions – of Web sites out there, and it's almost impossible to know which one has the information you seek. And some of the most useful information out there is tucked in some obscure database that never makes it to the top of Google's rankings of sites.

 

Google is the most popular search engine by far, with most users turning to it first for information – after all, Google knows all, as the saying goes. But, although Google sometimes lists hundreds of thousands of pages with elements of the information you seek, most users will never venture past the second or third page of findings looking for the data they seek.

 

For Web masters, getting on those top-listed pages is crucial. Google has a complicated formula that it uses for those rankings, much of it seemingly having to do with reciprocal hits from other sites (not just reciprocal links). The idea seems to be that the most visited sites have the most useful information for users – and it's an idea that makes sense, to some extent. A whole industry, in fact has sprung up, with the objective of showing Web masters how to get listed on those top Google pages in a search. But just because a site is popular doesn’t mean it has what the data you seek.

 

Mining through the data Google presents in a simple search takes time, because you can't always know what context your search word or phrase appears on the page. If you've got a fast internet connection or powerful computer that can have lots of browser Windows open at the same time, that helps speed things up somewhat – but you'll still spend time sorting out what Google thinks you're looking for versus what you really are interested in seeing. And then, of course, there are the databases that Google may or may not list, but usually never on the top ranked pages, as well as sites with useful information that don’t rank high up in the listings.

 

So how do you uncover the nuggets you seek – as quickly and neatly as possible, minimizing the data you have to wade through? Not to worry; we have ways of making your search easier, using tools provided by Google, as well as other general search sites – as well as hundreds of specialized search engines that will list information on specific subjects or industries, and even ways to get at useful public databases that will help you do anything from find new customers to helping you guess answers in crossword puzzles.

 

There are some Google tricks that are well known, and a slew of others not so famous, that will help you get to the heart of the data. Searching for a single word on a Web page is simple enough, but what if you're looking for a phrase? If you put State of Israel into Google's search bar, you'll get pages with all three words in separate places on the page. To ensure you get the term "State of Israel," simply put the phrase in quotes. And if you want to make sure the page includes two terms or phrases – like "State of Israel" and "Ariel Sharon" – simply put a plus sign between the two terms (as in "State of Israel" +"Ariel Sharon"). And to keep Sharon off your search, put a minus sign between the two.

 

But Google has a few other tricks up its sleeve. There is, of course, the Boolean search, which utilizes "And," "Or," or "Not" in searches (bipolar OR "manic depressive," bipolar AND "manic depressive). You can mix and match the boolean searches using parentheses, such as in this example: Israel + "peace process" (Egypt or Jordan).

 

Then there are the more esoteric Google commands. You might think that if your search term appears in a Web site's title, it might be more on target for your needs; to give that idea a try, use Google's intitle: syntax. You can also add other criteria to intitle, such as in this search: intitle:Israel +"Ariel Sharon", which will search sites with the word Israel in the title and the phrase "Ariel Sharon" on the page. You can also use "allintitle" to get a specific Web site name.

 

Two other related syntaxes – inurl: and site: - can further help narrow things down. With inurl:, you can search for criteria on specific sites, such as in this search: "Ariel Sharon" –"Shimon Peres" inurl:jpost, which will search for pages in the Jpost.com domain that contain the phrase "Ariel Sharon" without "Shimon Peres." The site: criteria does something similar, but you must specify a top level domain (.com, .org, .net. etc.) in your address – as in site:beeswax.com, while inurl:beeswax will search beeswax.com, .net, etc.

 

If you need to search a site that has lots of ads, links, etc., but want to filter all that stuff out, use intext: as your search criteria. Intext: can be combined with other criteria, as well. A search like inurl:cnn intext:link will give you all the pages with the word "link" as part of regular text. On the other hand, if you specifically want to check links – or more specifically, links that connect to a site – use the link: search criteria, as in link:www.jpost.com.

 

Other useful search criteria are inanchor: (which checks a Web site's link anchors, i.e., the text you click on get to a Web site), info: (which give you a way to get to pages cached by Google for a site), filetype: (which will find specific file suffixes, like .pdf or .jpg), and related: (which will find you other sites on the same subject as the one you searched for). And there's even a tool to check for cached pages by date – daterange: - in which you can check how pages changed between two dates (it only works with Julian calendar dates, so you have to convert your Gregorian date to Julian format, which you can do at the U.S. Naval Obervatory's Julian Calendar Converter at http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/JulianDate.html).

 

So, Google, as we have seen, can be a great deal more versatile and produce more accurate results with less effort than the way most people use it. Google, as a general search engine, carries under its umbrella sites of almost any kind. But what if you only wanted to check information on one subject – like inline skating, for example? Well, in that case you could use one of the many subject-specific search engines, like Skate City's search engine with 1,800 links to skating sites at http://www.skatecity.com/links. This, and dozens of other search engines can be linked to from Beaucoup (http://www.beaucoup.com), which lists engines like the Geonet Name Server (http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/index.html), which has nearly every geographical fact under the sun, the Argus Clearinghouse (http://www.clearinghouse.net/searchbrowse.html), which has links to guides on dozens of subjects, and the Crossword Solver at http://www.ojohaven.com/fun/crossword.htm. And if it is databases you are seeking, a good place to start is The Search Systems Free Public Records Directory (http://www.searchsystems.net/index.php), with links to publicly accessible databases all over the world listing copyrights, photographs, and the Jewish Law Library at http://www.jlaw.com, with Halachic decisions and cases decided in religious courts in Israel and around the world. Using these tool and databases, I've gotten so used to the idea of controlling information, that I am considering turning down that dog catcher job when it opens up. Being in charge of information is much better than being in charge of a bunch of dogs – after all, nobody has ever gotten fleas from Google.

 

ds@newzgeek.com