Chapter 4: Things You Can Find with Google

Google can find almost anything that exists in the open web. The open web is what we call webpages that can be accessed through their URLs alone, so if there's something that has a URL you can type into your web browser's address bar, Google can probably find it. It's called "open" because it's open for the entire Internet to see, and there are great things about that, but terrible things about it as well.

This means that Google is only as useful as the websites it indexes. For example, you can find lyrics of songs through Google because there are websites that make this information public on the open web. If there were no websites that did this, then Google would never be able to find any lyrics, and nobody would be searching for lyrics with Google, since there would never be any relevant results for lyrics.

In other words, learning to find things with Google is learning how the ecosystem of the web works. What websites exist out there on the Internet, what information they publish, and what keywords you can type in your queries so Google shows you the most relevant webpage of that website in its results page.

With that in mind, I think it's very important that we learn a bit about some of the websites that we can find through Google.

Searching for Articles on Encyclopedias

All of Wikipedia's articles can be accessed through their URLs, so all of Wikipedia articles are indexed by Google. If you search for:

turtle wikipedia

Google will show you a list of Wikipedia articles about turtles, including the one at this URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle.

Although the most popular, Wikipedia is not the only encyclopedia on the open web. The Encyclopedia Britannica also makes its articles available on the open web, and there are certain websites the behave like Wikipedia, such as TV Tropes. Their articles can all be found through Google.

Searching for Words on Dictionaries

There are also online dictionaries out there where each word definition has its own URL. You can search for:

irregardless dictionary

And Google will show you a Merrian Webster dot com link so you can check what that word means: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/irregardless.

Searching for Websites by Name

Google can find websites, because they have homepages. Say you know the name of a website, but not its domain name, or you aren't sure if it ends in .com, .net, .org, or some other TLD. Just ask Google. For example, if you type:

overclocked remix

Google will give you the correct URL of that website as its first result: https://ocremix.org/. I'd never have guessed that.

Searching for Software by Name

Google can find applications if those applications have websites, or if there is any webpage about them. The same applies to all kinds of software: games, smartphone apps, operating systems, plugins, browser extensions, mods, utilities, etc. For example, if you search for:

irfan view

Google will give you IrfanView's official homepage: https://www.irfanview.com/. There, you will be able to find information about how to download InfanView.

The same applies to any other application you may be interested in: if you search the app's name on Google, you will likely find some page that tells you how to download or install it.

Searching for Games by Title

Games often have their own webpages on the web, and so you can find them on Google by searching for the game's name.

However, in the case of games, many games are listed on the Steam's store, so they will have a Steam store page that has its own URL. Google may get confused about which webpage should be first on the results: the Steam store page, or the game's official website, but both of them will typically appear on the results.

For example, when I searched for:

hollow knight

The first result was https://store.steampowered.com/app/367520/Hollow_Knight/, which is its Steam store page. The second result was the game's official website https://www.hollowknight.com/.

Searching for Movies by Title

The IMDB (Internet Movie Database) collects information on all sorts of movies and series, including when they aired, trailers, who are the actors, the diretor, etc., and there are even movie reviews from users in the website. All of these things are available on the open web, so Google can find it. For example, if I search for:

the illusionist

The first result for me is https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0443543/, which is The Illusionist's entry on the IMDB.

In some cases there will be multiple websites that collect information about a same subject, or about overlapping subjects.

For example, every movie also has a Wikipedia article, and every Japanese anime movie also has a webpage on websites dedicated to collecting information about anime, such as MyAnimeList, and some movies also have their own websites, and perhaps even an official promotional account on social media websites, so which one of these many URLs will appear first in the results may vary, but the results will probably include all of them if you're willing to scroll down enough to see them.

It's also possible to find subtitles of movies and episodes on the web, in several languages, because some people make these available online.

Searching for Books by Title

You can also find information about books on the Internet thanks to websites like Good Reads that collect information about them. For example, if I search for:

fairy tale

Then Google will show me results about what is a fairy tale, which is not what I want. So I search for the name of the book plus the name of its author:

fairy tale stephen king

And then I'll get results from Amazon, which has a webpage where I can buy the book, from Wikipedia, and under that, I get Good Reads: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/60177373.

Many popular books have movie adaptations, so you may need to include the word book in the query to find results that talk about the book, as opposed to the movie. If that doesn't work because many webpages contain phrases such as "a movie adapted from a book by Stephen King" then you can try excluding results that contain the word "movie" from your search results by typing -movie in your query. This is the minus (-) operator the excludes terms.

Searching for Fan-Made Guides and Lore

There are many websites around the web that host content written by fans of games and series, explaining things about the series, cataloging the lore, and even writing guies about how to beat a game. You can find such information published on platforms like Fandom dot com. For example, when I search for

powerpuff girls chemical x

I get this article explaining what it is: https://powerpuffgirls.fandom.com/wiki/Chemical_X.

This sort of website is also called a "wiki."

There two things wikis are particularly good at. With series that already aired, a wiki article may contain references to every single episode that mentions a thing, collecting all the canonical information about it. With online games that change from patch to patch, the wikis may contain all sort of updated information that the developer doesn't officially publish. For example, if I search for:

genshin impact electro characters

I'll get the following URL in the results: https://genshin-impact.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Electro_Characters. As the game adds more characters, the fans add more pages to the wiki, so the information gets updated to match the current state of the game.

Searching for Authors and Artists

Google can also find artists and authors if they have websites or profiles on some art website, social media, or other platform. For example, if I search for:

daft punk

I get their official website: https://www.daftpunk.com/

In some cases, when searching for names of celebrities, you may get many news results about them at the top of the list, an no official website to be found. It may not even be clear if that celebrity HAS an official website. In these cases, you can try literally adding the terms official website to your query to help you find it.

Searching for Songs by Title

Google can also find information about songs, because websites about them exist. For example, if a song is uploaded to Youtube or Spotify, Google can find it by its title.

around the world

Searching for the above, Google gives me the URL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0HSD_i2DvA, posted by Daft Punk's official Youtube account, where I can listen to the song for free. Down the list of results, I can also find the Spotify result https://open.spotify.com/track/1pKYYY0dkg23sQQXi0Q5zN. I can not listen to the song on Spotify without logging in, which means I need to create an account. But I can see the page about the song without logging in, which means Google can see it as well, so Google can index it and find it for me.

Google can also find lyrics of songs because some people make this information available on webpages around the web.

Searching for Videos by Title

Similarly, Google can find any video posted video-hosting platforms like Youtube and Vimeo by their title. For example, if I search for:

there she is

Google manages to find the exact video I'm looking for on Youtube as the second result: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3quYcNI3dOs

In this case the first result is its Wikipedia article.

But note that the video was posted in 2017 on Youtube. The original version was posted in 2004 on Newgrounds, and it's still available on the open web, but appears below Youtube in the search results: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/161181.

Searching for Webpages by Title

Finally, besides the specific examples above, Google is also pretty good at finding an exact webpage so long as you know its title. If you've visited a webpage before and you want to find it again, you have two options:

If you visited in your browser, you can try finding it in your browser's history. This history typically only contains the title of the webpages, so you will need to know the title exactly or when you visited it exactly to find it.

Or you can just type words you remember from the webpage on Google. Unfortunately, the most important part of the webpage, the title, sometimes isn't visible when you are actually viewing the webpage. It only appears as the label of the tab in the browser.

For example, I know that every time Krita releases a new version, they publish a webpage with what was added to the program in this new version. So if I search for:

krita 5.2

Google can find for me the article they published with the changes: https://krita.org/en/posts/2023/krita-5-2-released/

This principle applies to all blogs on the Internet, and to all news articles published by news organizations that were made available on the Internet.

To highlight how powerful Google is at this, let me show you an example. If I search for this:

netscape agrees to develop browser for apple

The first result Google gives me is a 1996 article published by the New York Times with this exact same title: https://www.nytimes.com/1996/08/28/business/netscape-agrees-to-develop-browser-for-apple.html

I want to reiterate that this is only possible not thanks to Google itself, but thanks to the New York Times keeping an archive of their old articles available on the open web. If they didn't do that, Google would be useless for this. In such case, I might still be able to find the article if I go to their website and use the search engine in their website.

But if I don't know what website has the webpage I want, or if the website doesn't have its own search functionality, then I need Google or another search engine to find the webpage I want.

What Google gives is the convenience of having a centralized place to search for everything on the web. Just type into this one text box and you can find anything.

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