In the long ago days BG (Before Google), Yahoo! was the king of the search engines. If you wanted your company to be found, you wanted it found on Yahoo. Back in 1995 when Jerry Yang and David Filo launched Yahoo! it really was the only game in town.
Proving how exciting this new search concept was, the Yahoo! domain was launched in January 1995, and by that March had already received $3 million in funding. In 1998, the release of its first public offering raised $33 million. Not bad for a couple of Stanford Electrical Engineering students.
Two more Stanford students were destined to eclipse the success of Yang and Filo.
While in August 2009, according to Nielsen/Netratings, Yahoo! as a parent web company commanded a 57% reach of the global internet audience, Google attracted 84.10% of traffic in the same month. These numbers take into account all the subsidiary services provided by both Google and Yahoo!, and the numbers total more than 100% because each internet user will visit several of both Yahoo! and Google services.
Though significant, the traffic differential does not look earth-shattering. Not until you compare only the search facilities of each company. In August 2009, Google served 64% of all global searches. Yahoo! served only 16%. The relaunched Microsoft search engine, now named Bing, is catching up fast with 10% of searches served in August 2009.
So, what makes Google Search so effective?
One thing that made Google search stand out from the start was the extreme simplicity of its home page.
Despite the refining of its standard logo (and constant social commentary of its specialized logos), losing the grey shading and the supersize About Google link, and the addition of top level search links like Images, Videos, Maps etc., the Google home page is much the same today.
Back in the day, the Yahoo homepage had more going on.
Of course nowadays, the Yahoo homepage is even busier because it grew into a web portal where many services were available from one page. Yahoo’s search facilities were even leased out to Google for a while, so the overall importance of search to the company’s development was less obvious. However, if you look at Yahoo! Search today, you will se that when it comes to pure search functionability, Yahoo! took a page straight out of Google’s book and pared down all distractions:
So for the moment, Google is undisputed king of the search engines. Yahoo! has been hanging in there for years but Bing is really not far behind. Quite possibly with the rate Bing is growing, it could unseat Yahoo! from second position sometime in 2010.
But back to the search engine that gave the world a new verb. Take any average group of internet users and the question should be not, ‘Do you Google?’ but, ‘Do you Google Effectively?’
Getting More Out of Google
Google offers several specialist search engines right from the top of its homepage. Most people are familiar with Image, Video, Map, News and Shopping search, but there’s more. You can google for books in the public domain, within the finance industry or search only within blogs. Google Labs stretch the possibilities further by including Social Search, Similar Image, Flu Search, Google Squared and more.
While basic search on Google is most often enough, sometimes you need a little more kick to your keystrokes.
Search in quotation marks ("")
When looking for an exact phrase, put quotation marks around it. Google will deliver results with only those words in that same order. Google itself advises that this may limit your search unintentionally and gives the example of Alexander Graham Bell. If you wanted information on the inventor of the telephone and used the phrase search "Alexander Bell", you would be missing out on results which included his middle name or initial.
On the other hand, the exact phrase search is very useful when you want to do some copyright checking on the fly, or you remember a short phrase from a document but not the overall topic.
Search in site (site:)
If you wanted to find all the information on a specific site on any subject, then follow the keyword with the operator site: and the url. For example, health site: factoidz.com would find health related pages but only from within the Factoidz site.
Using the Wildcard (*)
The asterisk is a useful little guy. As well as helping find lost files on your computer by standing in for forgotten parts of filenames, it can stand in for unknown words with a search query. For example, if you searched for The * is near you would be surprised at how many ways not including the end, that this phrase has been used.
All in Title (allintitle:)
The title tag used in the header of an HTML document has long been one of the most important SEO elements when optimising a page to be found on the search engines. Knowing this, then, you would understand that keywords used in page titles are very important and this is a way to filter results to the most relevant. For example, if you search for salt you will get 112,000,000 possible results. If you search for allintitle: salt you will get 30,400,000 results - a huge reduction but still too many to work with. You can combine different operators to narrow this down further. If you are researching the health risks of salt try allintitle: "risks of salt" and now you have only 124 pages to work with, all of which are relevant to your research.
Not To Be Trusted
Some of the advanced search operators are of particular use in SEO (search engine optimisation) and as such you must expect Google’s results to be cloudy at best. For example the operator link: is supposed to show you external links back to a pariticular site. As Google would like a backlink to be a natural and organic ‘vote’ for a site and not an attempt to game the search engines, it will limit the number of links shown using the link: operator.
Google as a Convertor
Google also makes a handy convertor tool. Want to know how many pounds in 19 kilos? Just type the question into Google. The answer is 41.88 if anyone is interested. The same goes for converting kilometres to miles or fluid ounces in a liter.
One thing is certain, despite the occasional rumble of wishful thinking from those disatisfied with global googlizaton, Google contines to grow and push out more products. The fact that they are in general useful, time-saving and free, means that people will continue happily googling for their information and making use of all the subsidiary services that Google offers.
Some of the Google products are released quietly ‘into the wild’ whie others like Google Wave drum up a fanfare first. Keep your eye on Google releases via the Google Channel on Youtube, the Official Google Blog, Google on Twitter and Matt Cutts on Gadgets, Google and SEO.
