06/06/2022 www.rba.co.uk 1 Making Google Behave Society of Indexers Annual Conference Royal Agricultural University, Cirencester 5-7 th September 2014 Karen Blakeman RBA Information Services [email protected]www.rba.co.uk twitter.com/ karenblakeman Slides available on authorSTREAM, Slideshare and http://www.rba.co.uk/as/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- ShareAlike License .
Slides for my session at the Society of Indexers annual conference held at the Royal Agricultural University, Cirencester. 5th-7th September 2014. The session covered recent changes to the way Google works, how to use Google commands and search options to get better results, and how Google can get it horribly wrong at times.
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Making Google Behave
Society of Indexers Annual ConferenceRoyal Agricultural University, Cirencester
Google Play App Revenue Doubles in a Year http://mobilemarketingmagazine.com/google-play-app-revenue-doubles
With increased revenue, wearables focus, Google takes fast lane to mobile transition http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/increased-revenue-wearables-focus-google-takes-fast-lane-mobile-transition-227605.html
Google Brings More "Now" To Search With New Quick Answers http://searchengineland.com/google-brings-more-now-capabilties-to-search-with-new-quick-answers-169658
Personalises search based on– location – country, town
– past search history
– past browsing activity
– your activity in other areas of Google e.g. YouTube, blogs, images
– your activity on all your devices linked to your Google account
– what other people have clicked on for similar searches
– the device you are using
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Private browsing - quickest way “un-personalise”search
Chrome - New Incognito window Ctrl+Shift+N
FireFox Ctrl+Shift+P
Internet Explorer Ctrl+Shift+P
Opera Ctrl+Shift+N
Will not remove country personalisation
Not search engine specific, built into the browser
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Five things you need to know about Google search
2. Google automatically looks for variations on your search terms and sometimes drops terms from your search
– Google now tells you which terms it has ignored (some of the time)
– “..” around terms, phrases, names, titles of documents does not always work
– To force an exact match and inclusion of a term in a search prefix it with ‘intext:’
intext:agricultural occupational asthma
– Use Verbatim for an exact match search
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Let’s throw it into the soup and see if the cat licks it up
Google introduces the “soft AND”
“When you do a multi-term query on Google (even with quoted terms), the algorithm sometimes backs-off from hard ANDing all of the terms together.......it’s clear that people will often write long queries (with anywhere from 5 to 10 terms) for which there are no results. Google will then selectively remove the terms that are the lowest frequency to give you some results (rather than none)....Soft AND is a way to reduce the overall frustration and give the searcher something to examine (and with luck, a chance to reformulate their query).”
Tries to make “sense” of your query and put it into context, natural language queries
Not just search history but also your location, device being used
Announced 26th September 2013 but had already been implemented for about a month
Many aspects had been tested over the previous months and past year
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Menu options change depending on your search
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Google rewrites page titles
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Google's Matt Cutts: Why Google Will Ignore Your Page Title Tag & Write Its Own http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-look-title-match-query-190039
Edition of Monday, January 19, 1998, page 23 - Newspaper - Lavanguardia.es http://hemeroteca.lavanguardia.com/preview/1998/01/19/pagina-23/33842001/pdf.html
EU Court of Justice ruled that Google is a “data controller” under Data Protection legislation and must remove links to information that is “inadequate, irrelevant .... or excessive” from search results on a person’s name.
Subject can apply to have links in search results that point to specific information removed from the results
Not just Google – all search engines with an EU presence
Only applies to searches conducted in the EU + Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and Lichtenstein
Not automatic – subject has to apply and request will be assessed to see if the information is “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were processed.”
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How to get around it?
Google now removing results (and also adding back in results!) from searches in European country versions of Google
Indicates on the results page if information has been excluded
Google adds removal statement from all results for searches on personal names even if nothing has been removed
Use non-European Google to see all results e.g. Google.com, Google.ca - but will see country biased results
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Google Knowledge Graph and carousel
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Google gets it wrong again
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Google gets it wrong yet again
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Google "Henry VIII wives": Jane Seymour reveals search engine's blind spots http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/09/23/google_henry_viii_wives_jane_seymour_reveals_search_engine_s_blind_spots.html
Some Of The Weird Issues When Google's Quick Answers Come From Random Sources http://searchengineland.com/weird-issues-googles-quick-answers-comes-random-sources-197611
“Answers” appear at top of the results page and below the ads
Words in the title – can be single words or phrases
Ensures subject is the main focus of the article
Use advanced search screen or intitle:intitle:”diabetic retinopathy”
Words in the URL – can be single words or phrases
Use advanced search screen or inurl:inurl:”diabetic retinopathy”
There are allintitle and allinurl commands but they are unreliable and do not work with other commands
define
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Google search options
Date
Restrict your results to information that has been published within the last hour, day, week, month, year or your own date range
Search tools, Any time and select an option
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Google search options
Reading level
Changes the type of material that is returned
Run the search and from the menu above the results select Search tools, All results and then Reading level
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Google search options
Google Scholar
http://scholar.google.com/
“Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Google Scholar helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research”.
• Search all scholarly literature from one convenient place
• Explore related works, citations, authors, and publications
• Locate the complete document through your library or on the web
• Keep up with recent developments in any area of research
• Check who's citing your publications, create a public author profile
Includes open access material, pre-prints, institutional repositories (but not necessarily author self archived repositories)
Includes material that is NOT peer reviewed but is structured and looks like an academic article (title in large font, authors, affiliations, abstract, keywords, citations)
Pre-prints and IR copies may differ from final published version – charts and images may be redacted because of copyright restrictions
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Google Scholar
Does NOT use the publishers’ metadata
Date and author search looks in the area of the document where those elements are usually found
Page numbers, part of an address, data item may be mistaken for publication year
Sometimes gets the author wrong
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Google Scholar verified author and citations
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Google Scholar advanced search commands
Use advanced search screen or commands as follows:
+ sign before a search term to force an exact match, for example +norne
“....” around phrases for example “environmental remediation”
intitle: to search for a single word in the title, for example intitle:zeolites environmental remediation
allintitle: to search for all of your terms in the title, for example allintitle:zeolites environmental remediation
author: to search on an author’s name, for example
zeolites environmental remediation author:rhodes
site: to limit your search to specific institution for example
marcellus shale site:psu.edu
Commands can be combined for a precise search, for example