Lesson 4 - External Tools: Using Google to Search the Forum

You've mastered the advanced level and are comfortable using the built-in search function. In this lesson we will look at:

• Why use Google to search the forum?
• How? Basics of a Google search
• Understanding the results
• Narrowing down the results
• Google syntax
• Advantages of using Google search
• Disadvantages of using Google search

This lesson is suitable for advanced users who want to maximise their ability to locate information easily. If you are not already familiar with the built-in search functions and various operators, please return to the previous lesson, Advanced Searches.

Why use Google to search the forum?

There are a number of reasons why you may wish to use Google to search inside English Forum. You may simply be more used to the "natural language" type of searching that Google offers or the simple way that they sort their results. If you are having trouble locating certain information using the built-in search function of the forum, Google may sometimes help you dig out something that might be difficult to find.

How? Basics of a Google search

We'll start with the exact format you should use for your searches, then remove some of the elements and explain them later. Let's get started with the same query we used in earlier lessons. Enter your query into google like this:


Figure 4.1 - A typical English Forum search using Google

Before we examine the syntax of our search, let's take a look at the results:


Figure 4.2 - Results from a Google query

The most important thing to note is the number of results we received. Notice that this number is thirty. This is approximately the same as the number of threads returned from this query using the built-in search function in the previous lessons.

Understanding the results

Let's examine figure 4.2. From our thirty results only four are visible in our screen shot. How does the appearance of our results differ than those we get from the built-in search? The blue heading is the thread title, but we can also see two lines of text below. Google shows us the text immediately surrounding our search terms and displays the search terms themselves in bold text. This helps you to quickly guess is this the thread you might be looking for.

Below that in green we can see the URL - or web page address of the thread in question. You may notice that the thread title itself forms part of the URL - this is why writing descriptive thread titles containing relevant key words is so important - it is used by Google to find relevant threads.

Let's look a bit more closely at the individual results we can see. In first place we notice that this thread was found in the archive. It has "[Archive]" in the thread title, and also in the URL. Don't worry, we can still read it, it's just probably an old thread.

In second and fourth positions we see an actual thread and in the third position we see the Finance/Banking/Taxation section, rather than any specific thread. It has probably matched because this page is a listing of threads and some of the threads listed on the page may have contained our keywords. We probably want to ignore this entry.

Narrowing down the results

You may have noticed some extra terms we inserted into our search at the beginning. Let's look at these a little more closely. Did you see the command site:englishforum.ch? This tells Google to narrow down our search results from the entire internet, to only pages found at englishforum.ch. You've probably been using the site: command to narrow down your Google searches already (e.g. site:.ch to return only Swiss domains). site: has a cousin called inurl: but this doesn't work so effectively for our purpose, so we aren't going to explain it here.

You may have noticed that we entered another command -"view single post". The reason why we use this becomes apparent if we leave it out:


Figure 4.3 - Displaying both posts and threads in the results

If we look at the first entry we see a thread, or more accurately, page two of a thread. Google sees each page of a thread as a separate web page and will report them separately (unlike the built-in search which simply displays the thread). Notice how the other entries say "View Single Post"? These are the posts themselves. In our first search we wanted to see a list of threads, so we used the minus and the double quotes to exclude this exact phrase (we covered this same syntax in the previous lesson).

By removing the term entirely we get a mix of threads and posts. What would we search for if we wanted to see just the posts? You have probably already guessed:

Tax advisor "view single posts" site:englishforum.ch

This is almost the same as our first query, except that we dropped the minus sign, meaning that this phrase is now required rather than being excluded.

How could we narrow or broaden our terms further? Simple - just make sure that the site:englishforum.ch stays in the search and add or remove keywords, just as we did in the earlier lessons.

It is also important to bear in mind how our terms are searched. In the built-in search function results are only displayed if the search terms are found within each post. With a Google search (if single posts are excluded) then words could be matched on an entire page. This means that a post at the beginning may have "tax" and a post at the end "advisor" and they would be considered a match.

Google syntax

Google's syntax is not unlike the syntax you've already learned, except that it tends to be a bit more forgiving in terms of suggesting spelling corrections and trying to match up similar sounding words automatically. Operators such as plus, minus, double quotes, OR, AND work exactly the same way.

A Google query for tax OR advisor tells us that the number of results is 2,280, whereas the built-in search function limits those results to five hundred.

As well as the options we've been using so far, Google has a many other powerful search commands to narrow or broaden your searches. A full discussion of these within this document would be unnecessary, but you would benefit from reading this handy guide [google.com] about getting more out of Google.

Advantages of using Google search

Why would we choose a Google search over an internal search?

• When you want better sorting by Google's idea of "relevance", for example when you have a lot of search results and you are unable to narrow your query effectively.
• When you have too few results - the built-in search feature tends to be a lot more picky about spelling. Google knows that certain words are related and can therefore be a little bit less strict.
• When you want to search on a term less than three letters, e.g. UK. The built-in search function does not allow words of less than three letters in a search. Google on the other hand will allow two-letter words and abbreviations. Be aware that common words like "to", "the", etc. are automatically removed by Google. You can force them with the plus operator.
• When you want to access the various additional features of Google's search - far more feature-rich than the built-in search.

Disadvantages of using Google search

There are some times when it is better to use the built-in search function. What sort of disadvantages does a Google search have compared to the built-in one?

• Areas which are not public are never searched by Google. For example, everything in the Off-Topic area will never be found in Google's index. Since Google is not a member of the forum, it cannot see these areas.
• Searches may not contain the latest information. Google visits the forum often, but will never be as up-to-date as searching within the forum itself Posts or threads may have been moved around by the moderators after Google has indexed them. You might find that after you arrive, things look different to what you expected. Hint: used the "Cached" link in the Google results to show you Google's own copy of the page (older) if you suspect things have changed.
• You won't have access to some of the more powerful search features of the build-in search function such as limiting scope according to various areas of the forum, searching for posts from a particular poster, etc. Such things are not impossible with Google, but the search syntax would be very complex and cumbersome.

Now that you understand how and why to use a Google search to locate information on the forum, you can make a more informed decision about which method to use for particular searches.

What's next?

You are pretty much done. In the next section we'll list some more external resources that may be useful if you'd like to study the topic of searching in more detail. Remember - learning how to search effectively is a skill that will help you not just on the forum, but pretty much anywhere on the internet.