More and more often, I see people passing Google to come to forms and ask questions: sometimes the SAME question, already answered on the same site.

To fix this (and hopefully teach everyone a few tricks), I will be giving a beginners crash guide to Google and their wonders.

Let's start slow.

Lesson 1. Your browser and you!
Yes, I know this is a little silly, but I STILL meet people who do not know what a url bar is. For everyone who is confused by this, the url bar is the string of text inside a box near the top of your browser, the one that normally reads:
"http://www.somewhere.som/someFolder/some.html".
This text is an address pointing to where you got the page you are looking at (in this imaginary case, some.html).
All web pages are in folders somewhere, and those folders are in folders, just like your personal computer! For example, all files on this web site are really just text pages saved in a folder, and that folder is called "psp3d.com". Anywho, this is not THAT important for this tutorial, but it is neat to know.
(On a side note, please do not use IE6. Either upgrade to IE7 or Firefox 1.5/2.0)

Lesson 2. Analyzing your page.
There are really three types of web pages in the world, if you break them up into their components. Static web pages, Dynamic web pages, and files.

A static web page is a text file, one that is unchanging unless you change the original document on the server. Any code it needs for doing fancy things are written into that text file, as are links, images, etc. A good number of pages use this technique for small web sites.

A dynamic web page is also a text file, but the file contains some sort of high level code that is used to generate the page for you, the reader. Basically, the web page you read doesn't exist until you ask for it... When your browser DOES ask for it, the page uses the high level code to grab ads, the text you asked for, the menus, and any code it needs to run the page correctly. More and more people use this method for large sites, since you only have to make one title for example, and you can show it in thousands of places without having to change thousands of pages.

Files include images, zip/compressed folders, executable files/binaries, music: any document or data not meant to be used alone.

Now what we generally want when we search Google is to find as many Files as we can, or to find static/dynamic pages with useful/trustworthy information. For files, this can be difficult, but for static/dynamic pages, Google can help us out with this. Every static/dynamic page has the three following attributes:

Title - The text in the blue bar, above file edit, etc.
Text - The headers, body, image captions, etc.
Url - The address of this page in our browser

Lesson 3. Let us begin the roundup!
I will walk us through a text search, to show you how to think about searching Google:
Hmm... what is the best psp game out there?
Uh oh, I got a lot of stuff, 99 million results... Hmm.
Well, I do not want to know anything about psp cheats...
That is better, we are down to 58.9 million.
You know, we are not really getting a list of the best games...
Ooo, that is a lot better...
But what if there are more lists, like the top 5 or 25?
^_^ Let us use an OR! But not a normal OR, no sir:
And just so that we do not get a whole lot of random number pages, let us enclose that top x with quotation marks:
This searches for "top 3" or "top 5" or... well, you get the idea. ^_^ Neat.
Still, what if they do not say "top"? What if it is "best" or "coolest?
OR to the Rescue!
This searches for "top 3" or "best 10" or ... ALL combinations of the first three and the second 5! That is 15 ORs that we compacted right there.

That was pretty easy, and I got a good result as well!

So what should we learn from this?
A. Use the minus sign (-). See something odd? Get rid of it!
B. Use Quotation marks (" "). Prevents you from getting pages about corn, or other odd things.
C. Use the modified OR (this|that|thus). The | symbol is above the enter key, press shift to use it. This is a great tool, and can get you many results you never thought of.
D. Go ahead and put a (+) sign in front of your terms, to prevent anything being ignored by Google.
E. Use the next section. ^_^

Lesson 4. Refining our love...
Using lesson 3 alone will probably be more than enough for any average user.
That being said, lets move on!

Let us say I need help from this site.
This gives me all web pages from psp3d.com.
Hmm.... I wonder...
All psp3d.com pages about corn. Heh.
Use that trick to easily search badly written web pages, like your school or the government.
This is a great way to find lost web pages.

What if you are looking for a certain word in the url? Or the title, or the text?
Use these three to make AWESOME searches.

This is a neat trick, the link command:
This shows all web pages that link to psp3d.com! About 2,080 showed up... Remember, if you linked to the forum page, that does not count, only if you linked DIRECTLY to psp3d.com.... ^_^
THIS one is awesome: the Related command.
Give me links to all pages similar to psp3d.com! I got some interesting results on this one.
This one is sorta neat... The same result happens if you search for a url in the search box.
Gives you some of the above options. Not useful for searching.
Get definitions for words...
Get stock info...
If you have Gmail, you can also search for:
label: //Duh
from: //Duh
to: //Duh
subject: //Any word/string in Subject
has:attachment //Self explanatory.
filename: //Searches attached files
in:anywhere //Searches everywhere.
in:inbox //Shouldn't be any extra mail here if you archive often enough.
in:trash //Shouldn't be much here.
in:spam //obvious.
is:starred //If you marked it as starred (importance marking)
is:unread //also obvious
is:read //Again, obvious
cc: //Searches the cc field
bcc: //Searches the bcc field
after: //Searches emails after date x
before: //Searches emails before date x

You can make some complex filters too, by putting all this in the "Has the Words" field with some OR's...
For example, I have these filters in gmail: (Just put these in the "Has the Words field")

Now some of you may be asking, "What are Google Alerts, and why do you label them?"

Google Alerts are searches of the news that Google does for you, automatically, and then emails you the results.
Google Alerts

For example, I have google search for PS3, PSP, Xbox 360, and Google.
Once a week, I get a report on the top news for each topic.
^_^ Yeah, its neat. And thanks to the above filter, it skips my inbox until I want to read it!

You could also do advanced Google Alerts... Such as:
And have it update you "as it happens", so that you are the first to know when the media finds out that 2.80-3.00 are hacked!

Just an idea.

Lesson 5. Addressing the masses...
Ok, now that we have the basics down (and some of the not so basics), what is left?

Files.

Best access to files can be had if you can find pages WITHOUT index.html files.
Try this search.
This returns all files in folders that have no index files. Want a specific type?

For music: Try adding +(mp3|mp4|wav|midi)
For video: Try adding +(avi|wmv|mpeg|mpg)
For a band: Add the name of the band and either the music or video option.

Well, you get the idea. Let me know if I missed anything, or if you also have a great gift when it comes to the power of Google!

(Note: Please do not take anything without permission. Thank you.)

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