Chapter 2: How to Search the Web Using Google

Now that we already know what Google is, let's start learning how to use search on Google.

Basic Workflow

To search on Google, all we need to do is type something on Google's search box, and press the enter key to search, or click on a button that starts the search.

There are many "Google search boxes," many ways to search on Google. We won't talk about all of them here. We'll focus on the one you see when you access Google's website through https://www.google.com/.

So, go to Google's website, type something in the text box that appears in the middle of the screen, and then press the enter key or click on the button labelled "Google Search" in order to search for something.

You can also click on a microphone button to the right of the search box to say what you want to search for instead of typing. I believe this is how most people search on smartphones. There's a button to search by image instead of words as well. We'll learn how that one works later.

The Search Results Page

Once you've searched for something, your browser will go to a page called the Google's search page. Many search engines work similarly, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc., so much we even have a generic term for this page: the Search Engine Results Page, or SERP for short.

On the SERP you'll find a list of links that Google thinks are the most relevant for your query, for what you typed. The most relevant link will be the first result. Going down the list you'll find less and less relevant results, at least according to Google's algorithms.

If you can find what you want in the list, all you have to do is click on the link and your browser will go to the result's webpage. If you can't find it in the results, go back to the search box and try typing something else.

If you click the button "I'm Feeling Lucky" instead of "Google Search," Google won't show you the search results page, instead, Google will tell your web browser to go directly to what would be the first result, so it would work like if you just clicked the first result instantly without even checking if it's the result you want.

In the past, SERPs used to be very simple, showing only a list of results. Nowadays, they're incredibly more complex and can include all sorts of information. Google and other search engines often change how their SERPs look like, so the screenshots you see above may not be representative of what they look like today, and they may also vary from country to country.

Despite this, in a single search result you'll generally be able to find:

1. The title of the webpage.
2. The URL of the webpage.
3. A snippet with relevant words marked in bold.

See What Each Part of a Search Result Means on Google if you're interested in the details.

In the screenshot above, we can see that the word "turtles" is marked in bold in the snippets of the results. This means that Google thinks this word matches what we typed. Note that in the query I typed "turtle" (singular) not "turtles" (plural), but Google is smart enough to match the plural of the singular word.

The Search Predictions

As you type in the search box, Google may show you a list of "search suggestions" that try to complete the sentence that you are typing. This list is generated by a program and tends to include terms that most people search for and it tends to be quite useful. You can quickly select a prediction by pressing the down arrow key and pressing enter.

Warning: if you type the name of ANY fictional character on Google, the first thing that will show up in the predictions is "name of character DEATH" if there's any scene in the series where the character dies. It doesn't matter if it's a book, or a movie, or a cartoon. If a character dies, Google will spoil it. Avoid typing names of characters on Google until you finish the fiction.

All, Images, Videos, News, Shopping, and More

Under Google's search box you will usually find some tab-like buttons labelled "All," "Images," "Videos," "News," "Shopping," "Maps," "Books," "Flights," and "Finance." Often only a few of these will be shown, while the rest will be grouped in a dropdown menu that you can access by clicking a single "More" button.

The order of the buttons shown sometimes change for reasons beyond my understanding. Seriously, I wish they stopped doing that.

Some of these buttons change the mode of search that Google uses to search the web. By default, it searches "All," previously called "Web." In this mode, Google searches for any and all webpages.

If you click the "Images" button, Google will show a completely different interface for searching for images on the web. Other modes also have unique interfaces: "Videos" and "News" have interfaces very similar to the default interface; "Books" is a little different; "Shopping" has unique widgets to find products; "Maps" searches for location on an actual world map; "Flights" lists flights; and "Finance" lists stocks you can purchase.

I don't plan to cover all of these modes in this series, as some of them are just entirely different web applications from the default search. In fact, you can even find Maps, News, and Shopping in a menu labelled "Google apps" on the top right corner of Google's webpage. I plan to cover only the default search mode and the "Images" search mode in this series.

Tools

To the right of the search modes you can find a button labelled "Tools." Clicking on it will reveal some tools available for that search mode, including a link to a page where called "Advanced Search." Different modes have different tools available. We'll see how they work in detail later.

Safe Search

The rightmost button on the webpage's toolbar is labelled "Safe Search" and controls how Google censors its results. While Safe Search is enabled, Google will not show results that it deems inappropriate for minors.

It's worth noting that Google will never show results that it detects to be "unsafe" in the sense of results that contain viruses or other malware, regardless of what Safe Search is set to. So if Google CAN detect malware in a webpage, it will just never show that webpage no matter what you type. However, that doesn't mean every result is necessarily safe: sometimes Google can't detect it, and sometimes a webpage changes after Google indexed it.

Stale Results

Google doesn't search the entire Internet every time you type something in the search box. It searches its index, which it creates from all the webpages that it can find, and that it updates regularly and automatically with fresh information.

This means that the content of the index can be different from the content of the actual webpage, and so Google will find your words in a result that may no longer actually contain those words anymore.

For example, say there is a webpage that lists the top 10 most recent posts of a website. If Google indexes the webpage one day, and then 10 posts are posted the next day, the webpage will have completely changed. Any time that webpage appears in the search results, the match will be wrong, because the match only made sense the day before.

It's also possible for webpages to be deleted and for webpages to be moved. In either case, the website may show you a 404 Not Found error when you click the result. It may still be possible to find that webpage in its current version if you copy the title of the result and paste it on Google.

There are also some nastier cases.

For example, the other day I encountered two different WordPress websites of universities through Google that were infected with the same sort of malware. What this malware did was: if you access the website through Google, it redirects you to a completely different website. So that's another thing that can happen: the website may have been infected.

There are also cases the website is temporarily down and so you can not connect to it. In such cases, it's possible to view the version of the webpage that Google has in its index typing cache: followed by the URL of the webpage without a space between them.

It's also possible for the website to be permanently down. Gone forever from the Internet. This last case is rather rare, as Google will simply stop indexing a website if it seems gone for too long.

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