What Are You Looking For?
When we want to find something, Google is the first place that millions of people go to for assistance. It is amazing all of the useful and trivial things you can find using Google, but many people don’t realize that they can do a lot more than simply type in a word or phrase to help them find what they want, and reduce the number of entries they don’t want to see.
The Google search box allows for a variety of really helpful options. If I search for Big Band, I get about 96 million entries. It is a pretty safe bet that most of those are not what I am looking for. In this case pages with the word “big” will appear and pages with the word Band will appear. If I put quotation marks around the phrase it limits the results. Searching for “Big Band” now returns about 8.7 million entries. But perhaps I don’t want to read about Glen Miller. I can exclude terms from my search by putting a space and then a minus sign in front of the word I don’t want to appear.
“Big Band” -Glenn -Miller eliminates the pages that contain Glenn or Miller, but that means I won’t find Al Miller and perhaps I want Al to also show up in the results.
Perhaps I really am looking for something I read in the San Diego Union Tribune about big bands. I can limit my search results to web pages from the San Diego Union Tribune’s website by including site: signonsandiego.com, which is the Tribune’s web site.
So, “Big Band” -Glenn site:signonsandiego.com returns about 300 results which is starting to get manageable. May be I want results only from specific countries, rather than from the Tribune’s web site. To get results from Singapore I can use the Singapore country code (sg) and search “Big Band” -Glenn site:.sg
At http://www.google.com/help/cheatsheet.html you can print out a cheat sheet that documents a lot of the features that Google search supports. http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer=136861 is also helpful.
There is something you must always be very, very careful about when using Google or any search engine. The bad guys know people are looking and so they work very hard to make sure their malicious web pages turn up in a search. If you click on a result and are prompted to install, run, or download something, then the odds are extremely high that it is a malicious web page and you should close your browser immediately. If you click on a result and the page says it is scanning your computer or that your computer is infected, it is a malicious web page… close your browser and do not click on anything in the web page.
If you have any questions or comments about this or other general security topics, feel free to email me at askeset@eset.com
Randy Abrams
Director of Technical Education
ESET LLC
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