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Using Google ProfessionallyOh, what larks!

CILIPTV, Wednesday, 3rd September 2014RISC Global Cafe, London Street, Reading

Karen BlakemanRBA Information Services

Karen.Blakeman@rba.co.uk

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 4.0 International License.

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Search Engine Market Share June 2014 http://theeword.co.uk/info/search_engine_market.html

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2014 Financial Tables – Investor Relations – Google https://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html

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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

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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

More about this later

EU - so called “right to be forgotten” ruling

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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.

Information is NOT removed from the web

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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http://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2014/06/06/five-reasons-not-to-invoke-your-right-to-be-forgotten/

Five things you need to know about Google search

1. Google personalises your search

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

– what other people have clicked on for similar searches

– the device you are using

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Google's Privacy Policy

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"Our new Privacy Policy makes clear that, if you’re signed in, we may combine information you’ve provided from one service with information from other services. In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products, which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience."

Toward a simpler, more beautiful Google http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/toward-simpler-more-beautiful-google.html

"we're more excited than ever to build a seamless social experience, all across Google"

How to “un-personalise” your search

Switch off web/search history

Log out of your Google account

Clear cookies

Use private/incognito browsing

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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 site:nhs.uk

– Use Verbatim for an exact match search

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).”

Dan Russell

http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2011/11/08/dear-google-stop-messing-with-my-search/#comments

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Let’s throw it into the soup and see if the cat licks it up

Google – missing terms

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Google Verbatim

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Five things you need to know about Google search

3. Google web search does not search everything it has in its database

– two indexes: main, default index and the supplemental index

– supplemental index may contain less popular, unusual, specialist material

– supplemental index comes into play when Google thinks your search has returned too few results

– Verbatim and some advanced search commands seems to trigger a search in the supplemental index

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“Normal search”1,555,500

Search after Verbatim is applied35,500,000

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Five things you need to know about Google search

4. Google changes its algorithms several hundred times a year How Google makes improvements to its search algorithm

- YouTube http://youtu.be/J5RZOU6vK4Q

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Five things you need to know about Google search

5. We are all Google’s lab rats

Just Testing: Google Users May See Up To A Dozen

Experiments

http://searchengineland.com/just-testing-google-searchers-may-see-up-to-a-dozen-experiments-141570

Mostly minor effects on search but sometimes totally bizarre

results

Google decides that coots are really lions

http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2011/02/12/

google-decides-that-coots-are-really-lions/

Update on coots vs. lions

http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2011/02/21/

update-on-coots-vs-lions/

Hummingbird

Not just an update but a completely new algorithm

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 Maps

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

http://googlesystem.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/google-knowledge-graph-gets-confused.html

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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

Image courtesy of Will Oremus

Nutrition facts

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Information from Wikipedia and USDA

Compare

compare spinach with cabbage

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Do not always need ‘with’

Compare

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Google Quick Answers

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

Try– your favourite football club

– flight times

– symptoms of a medical condition

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And this afternoon (3rd September) I got this as an answer for symptoms of wheat intolerance......

To quote the song “It must be true because I read it in the Daily Mail”

Essential commands

Think file format– PDF for research papers, lengthy documents, government

reports, industry papers

– ppt or pptx for presentations, tracking down an expert on a topic

– xls, xlsx or csv for data and statistics

filetype: command zeolites environmental remediation filetype:pdf

"north sea" deep water drilling filetype:ppt

"north sea" deep water drilling filetype:pptx

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Essential commands

Site searchFor searching large websites, or groups of sites by type for example government, NHS, academic

Can exclude sites using -site:

agricultural occupational asthma UK site:nhs.uk

agricultural occupational asthma UK site:ac.uk

agricultural occupational asthma UK site:gov.uk

agricultural occupational asthma UK site:gov.uk –site:hse.gov.uk

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Essential commands

Numeric range search

Anything to do with numbers and quantities: years, temperatures, weights, distances, prices etc

Use the advanced search screen or type in your two numbers separated by two full stops as part of your search

  TV advertising spend forecasts 2015..2020

world oil demand forecasts 80..100 mb/d 2015..2030

toblerone 1..6 kg

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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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daterange:

Date restriction does not work with Verbatim

Use daterange: command instead

Uses Julian date format (fractions omitted)

Julian Date Converter http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/JulianDate.php/

Syntax– for example pages between June 20th and June 26th 2012

talking about the Statoil/Rosneft cooperationdaterange:2456098-2456104 Statoil Rosneft

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daterange: the easy way

Third party tools for the daterange: search for example http://gmacker.com/web/content/gDateRange/gdr.htm then apply Verbatim

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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

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Google Scholar for systematic reviews?

BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making | Full text | Is the coverage of google scholar enough to be used alone for systematic reviews http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6947/13/7

No, Google Scholar Shouldn’t be Used Alone for Systematic Review Searching | Laika's MedLibLog http://laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com/2013/07/09/no-google-scholar-shouldnt-be-used-alone-for-systematic-review-searching/

BMC Medical Research Methodology | Full text | Google Scholar as replacement for systematic literature searches: good relative recall and precision are not enough

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Patents

https://www.google.com/patents

Coverage:– US

– Canada

– European Patent Office (EPO)

– Germany

– China

– World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO)

Patents available in original language and English (Google Translate)

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Google Public Data Explorer

http://www.google.com/publicdata/One of Google's best kept secrets!

Public data sets made available by Eurostat, World Bank, IMF, CSO Ireland, OECD, ITU, some national statistics offices (but not ONS), and many more.

Source and date updated given.

Charts and charting options can highlight oddities and missing data

Look at the charts to see if there is a sudden change in the trends.

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Google Public Data Explorer Minimum Wage

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Eurostat - Minimum Wage

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books.google.com

Includes magazines, journals, archives of newspapers (mainly US)

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Google Finance - https://www.google.co.uk/finance

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Images – usage rights

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Images – use an existing image

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Click on the camera icon in the search box and then either enter the URL of an image or upload the image

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Images – colour (not always what you expect)

Search for patent and select the colour red (Thanks to Arthur Weiss for the example)

Constitute https://www.constituteproject.org/

“The world’s constitutions to read, search and compare”

Supported by Google Ideas

See http://comparativeconstitutionsproject.org/ for background and who is involved

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Google Cultural Institute http://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/about/

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Google Art Project http://www.googleartproject.com/ http://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/project/art-project

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Google ArtProject museum view

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1. Important to keep up to date with what Google and the other search engines are doing, and with regulatory changes

Search Engine Land http://searchengineland.com/ Search Engine Roundtable https://www.seroundtable.com/Search Engine Watch http://searchenginewatch.com/

2. Get to know Google commands and where the search options are hidden

3. Never, never, never trust the “answers” on Google’s results pages

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Thank you!

Questions?