Specialized Google Commands

Transcription

1 Transcript for page 1, Welcome Welcome to the module that is dedicated to all things Google. Many of the other search modules that we've covered include search techniques and commands that work across several, or at least some of the major, search engines. In this module we specialize only in commands that work on Google and nowhere else. So you won't see anything here that you can use in any other search engine but since Google is the 900 pound gorilla of search and most people do use Google pretty much above everything else, at least for the time being, it's worth exploring this topic because there are some commands on Google that you just can't do anything with anywhere else. Let's have a look at the learning objectives. Transcript for page 2, Learning Objectives When you walk away after completing this module you should know how to use the more search tools link, which many people completely ignore. It's on the left hand side of Google and there's some hidden gems in there that make our life as researchers much easier if only somebody took a moment to explain them to you. You'll also know how to apply things such as the fill in the blank search command. Both of those are very powerful and unique to Google. You should be able to recall how to use the related defined and in-text commands, all three which are special to Google and don't exist anywhere else. Although some have slight variations in other search engines the related defined and in-text are really the best of their kind as far as unique syntax. You'll be able to use image search to eliminate junk results or unnecessary content. You'll be able to find publications such as journals and magazines and other professional publications using Google Books. I know even though that doesn't really sound like it's a publication, as in a magazine, Google Books is actually also including all of the magazines. You'll be able to use Google maps to identify local talent using a triangulation approach that combines both the data from the regular Google

2 plus the geographic data all in one search. You'll also know how to use some of the special syntax that blog, search, dot Google, dot com offers and some of the more advanced queries like for example number range commands for using in zip code ranges and things like that. So get ready for lots of fun with specialized Google commands. Transcript for page 3, Inside Google Very often overlooked is the more search tools on Google. From any Google.com search on the left hand side you'll see a menu that has a few items, follow that menu down below, it might even be below the fold, in other words you have to scroll down a little bit and you'll see all results, related searches and more search tools. Go ahead and click on more search tools. There's some pretty cool stuff in here. My favorites are the date range search, image search, sites that I haven't yet visited and the advanced reading level search, and my all-time favorite is verbatim which is like going back in time and using Google before they added all the sophistication. It's kind of a straight, old school Google approach. So let's take a look at each one of these. First the date range. With the date range you'll be able to narrow down your search to only pages that are, let's say, from the last hour which may be near real-time results, from the last day, week, month or year so you get fresh content however you define that, you could also customize a range of dates. Why would you want to do that? Well if you click on custom range what will happen is it will bring up a calendar, let's say that you want to define conversations that took place online during a particular conference or event. Maybe one that happened in At that time this conference took place the pages and the data that was online is more relevant than things that might be talked about today using the same key words. For example, it might have a list of bios of people or something like that. So because of that custom range lets you take a slice of time and only look at that particular slice. So that's not something you're going to use often but when you need it you really do need it. Sites with images, when you look at all results the very first one, what that does is it

3 eliminates any website that does not have a photograph. What's particularly useful about this to realize is that resumes very often are images, PDF documents are considered images and there are other formats such as tiff and jpeg and many others that are image like. So when you do sites with images you'll get resume content and you'll also get websites that have things like headshots and group photos that are more likely to be personal pages and less likely to be spam or something like that. Below that you'll see visited pages and not yet visited. Visited pages is useful if you tried to find something that you know you found before but you can't remember the URL, you can go to visited pages and try your search terms and it will kind of search your previous searches. But for me not yet visited is really much more useful because if I do a search for resumes I don't want to see resumes that I've already seen before. So by clicking on not yet visited it won't show me results that I have clicked in the past. That's pretty cool. Reading level surprisingly is very useful. If you think about reading level what it does is it separates it into three categories, basic, intermediate and advanced. Now what do you think would be an advanced reading level? Did you think college level? You'd be right. Now what makes something an advanced or college level reading material? Well probably things such as a high density of complex words or lots of technical jargon. And guess what, that's exactly what exists on resumes. So because of that if you click on reading level and choose advanced you'll get a lot of resumes. Sure you'll be eliminating results that are basic resumes, that are written in plain English, but that's okay because you're getting a good set of quality results, helps you eliminate some of the junk. After that the next one is verbatim and by clicking on that what you basically are doing is going back in time to look at Google the way it was before so it's effectively replacing the plus that we used to use when we wanted a word to be included. If you're searching for the word "the" then Google will automatically ignore it because it appears on too many websites. But with verbatim it will actually include "the". So verbatim is like searching for exactly without any synonyms or any other kind of variation. How cool is that?

4 Transcript for page 4, Fill in the Blanks The wildcard, as you might have seen it referred to, also known as the asterisks is shift 8. It's what happens when you press the shift button and the 8 key. The wildcard usually means truncation or stemming. On Google however the wildcard does not mean stemming, it is basically a fill in the blank. So it takes the place of a word, any word, hence the term wildcard like a wildcard in poker, inside of a phrase. So that usually implies that you're going to have some sort of three word variation, could be more than three words, could be as many as you want but it's usually a fill in the blank kind of search so you need to have something to the left or right otherwise there's no blank to fill out. For example, if you look for SAP wildcard consultants you'll get results that include SAP FICO consultants, SAP ABAP consultants, SAP PM consultants, and many other variations. This is, as you'll find, more accurate than just SAP consultant because most people don't call themselves an SAP consultant, if they have a specialty they'll probably put that in there whatever their specialty is. Technical recruiter, for example, or forensic accountant, things like that. So use that when you're trying to find variations of job titles. You can use two or more asterisks together, or wildcards together, so in that same example it would be SAP wildcard wildcard consultant. Notice that there's a space between those so unlike with many of the commands that we've talked about, like the colon, you usually don't want to have a space, in this case SAP is followed by a space followed by the wildcard and then another space and then the word, or in this case a second wildcard. You can three, four, five, as many as you want but keep in mind at a certain point you have diminishing returns. If you have too many wildcards the phrase is too long and you might lose some of the sentence because there's periods and commas in between and it might actually be referring to two different lines of text. So keep it to two or three or four, experiment with it. Definitely very useful. Also it can work without the quotation marks, so if you didn't use "SAP asterisks consultant" it might work but you're better off specifying where

5 the phrase is in case you're using this in conjunction with other key words. So it's always a good idea to do it, it's not going to hurt you to have quotes, it might hurt you not to have quotes. And finally, if you use something like three asterisks make sure that you've got good specific or unique words to the left and right because otherwise you're not finding lots of different sentences. So, for example, SAP asterisks asterisks asterisks might find someone who says SAP ABAP FICO APM consultant, that's all three. You want to get as specific as you possibly can. Transcript for page 5, intext: The intext command it's usage is intext colon and then some character or word or set of words after it, you can use quotes so you can use phrases after the intext. But it has the same effect, conceptually, as inurl and in title. With inurl and in title you are looking for words in the URL or words in the title. So in this case, naturally, you're looking for words in the plaintext as in not words that appear in the meta tags or the URL's or the titles. So why would we need to use this? Well sometimes when the word appears in the address or title of a page it's describing a particular category of content and when we're looking for something very specific, like a company name or a job title, we don't want that to be in the address. A lot of job postings, for example, will have the job title as the URL or the title of the page. But if it's in the plaintext of the document it's probably a document that talks about that job and may often be a resume if you include other resume like words. So think about what words appear in the text but not in the meta tags or not in the title and not in the address. Let me ask you a question, what do you think is the most commonly found word on resumes? Think about it for a second and don't just say, "oh, resume". It's not what you would expect. The most commonly found word on resumes is actually not a word but a number. Every resume will always have a year. Why? Because it will be dates of employment, it'll be dates of education, no matter what there'll always be a four digit year. So if you can do a search for the word 2010 you'll more likely find, especially in the text of the document, you'll more

6 likely find resumes. However if you search for 2010 in the address or URL or all over you might find a lot of blog posts that are dated So that's one of the reasons we use intext for something like that. What do you think is the second most commonly found word? Almost every resume has this. They don't all have it but they almost all have it. If you're thinking objective, nope, some resumes don't have objectives. They just go right into their resume. If you're thinking experience well maybe it's work history or sometimes it's spelled a different way. Maybe experience is left out completely. Is it education? Nope, sometimes education is left out as a word, it just says degree from and then the degree and the school without actually calling it out as education. So if it's not objective or experience or education what else is it then? References, well no, not everybody puts references, especially on the web where I don't want just anybody finding out who my references are, that's kind of a little private. Believe it or not the second most commonly found word is the word "present". Related to date almost every resume in their current job says from date, date, date to present. Most people who are currently working, and even some who have left their job still have the word present on there. Now it could be till date or till now or till current or some other variation but present seems to be very much widely used. So if in the text of a document, in the plaintext of a document, there's a year and the word present you're probably looking at a resume. Pretty cool, huh? Go ahead and try it out. Run some tests and use intext 2010 and intext present. Transcript for page 6, define: and related: Unlike many of the other commands that we talk about these two cannot be used in conjunction with anything else. They are standalone commands. So if you are going to use the define or related command you cannot include any other keywords in your search. This is basically a very narrow search. But both of them have very practical uses for us as recruiters and sourcers. Define followed with the colon and then some word, and by the way you can use quotations and use phrases here, is going to help find

7 definitions for unfamiliar terms. For example, if you don't know what transfer pricing is put it in quotes, use the define command and go ahead and click on that link and you'll see it takes you to a results page and at the top it'll show you it's variation of the definition of transfer pricing along with links to a bunch of other places that might also define transfer pricing. Go ahead, I'll wait. Click. Welcome back. And if you didn't go anywhere, okay, you tricked me. Good for you. Deciphering key words is also very useful when they are acronyms. If you don't know what LMNOP stands for or some other type of internal abbreviation and assuming that it's not an abbreviation that exists only in your company and nowhere else, if it's an acronym or abbreviation that is commonly used define will help you locate what it means so that you can expand your search terms. With related, again related colon and no spaces, you can get a list of up to 180 websites that have statistically similar content to that of your competitor. So these are not companies that are necessarily competitors in a direct consumer to consumer sense, in other words Coke versus Pepsi, these are companies that have content on their webpages similar to the content on either your webpages or your company or client's webpages. So you might find with related colon Wyeth if you click on it you'll see a list of lots of other pharmaceutical companies. And this is a very good way to create a short list of target companies for your sourcing activities. It's not limited to just companies though. It also works with nonprofits, organizations, associations and conferences. Click on related colon wraps.org [sounds like] and you'll find lots of other regulatory affairs types of organizations listed. Each one of those could be a site search or you could use their abbreviations in searches for resumes. Finally, you can use define similarly to the way you use related which is to define a particular industry, for example if you say define Motorola it'll give you sort of an industry report about Motorola, kind of a combination between define and related. Transcript for page 7, Google Images Back at the beginning of this module we discussed how websites

8 with images are useful at eliminating positive... Specialized Google commands, Google images. Back at the beginning of this module we talked about more tools on the left hand side of the Google search and briefly mentioned images. But there's more that we can do with images. By going to images.google.com we can search for photographs of a particular type. Here you can use the same kind of search terms you would regularly use, for example for resumes, and you'll find websites that have photographs of resumes. Doesn't have to be a jpeg, could be a PDF sometimes or a tiff or, well even a jpeg can also be a resume. But more than that, you could also search for headshots. That is basically faces. So if you go into images you're able to on the left hand side, if you go down a little bit on the menu, find images of just people. Now these are hosted on all kinds of different websites, social media profiles often have headshots. But it could also be a blog or some kind of other magazine or journal. And because it's a face it's more than likely going to be an individual being mentioned and a lot less likely to be a job posting or some other kind of content that is not useful to us as recruiters. This is one of those things that you have to see it to believe it so let's do a quick video. Transcript for page 8, Images Video From a Google search you can just click on "Images" here on the top. Or if you have already conducted a search, it's an option available on the left-hand side or you could just type in "Google.com/images" or "Images.Google.com". Any one of these would work. You'll end up in a page that looks like this, just called Google Images. For this example, let's take a look at that Taxes Partner, in quotations. In a simple search for that, brings back some interesting images; some graphics, some headshots, kind of mixed up. What we really want to do is on the left-hand side, you'll see below all results in any size. There's color and then type. There's also standard view and date range searches. These are all things that I encourage you to play around with, but the really cool one is "Face". So what Google is doing, it might seem like magic; might seem like, "Oh my god, they have facial

9 recognition software in the Internet." Not really, it's kind of a rough way to do it. If you think about it, a face is two dark circles and a dark line underneath it. So two eyeholes and a pie hole; anything that has that kind of pattern of two eyeholes and a pie hole is going to show up in this search. So most of the time, there's going to be headshots from people's social networks. But one disadvantage is that you actually have to hover over it in order to see the footnote or wherever it came from. Transcript for page 9, Google Number Ranges It used to be that in order to search for this when it was first introduced we needed to use the command "num range" Num range colon and then a range of numbers. That's no longer the case. Now all we have to do to evoke the range of numbers command is to use a low number separated from a high number with two dots. Not three. If you're looking at your screen and think this is supposed to be a suspended period or dot, dot, dot and somehow I've made a typo, don't. It's actually two dots. So it would be to find any number between five and 100 including 5 and 100 and also including 6, 7, 8, etc. We can use it inside of phrases such as the example you see there, very useful for finding people that are supervisors or managers you could say managed 5 to 100 people and somebody who's managed 80 people will come up. Replace managed with supervised and led and you get different results. Also managed 5 to 100 staff instead of people, again different results. You could use a or statement but with the quotations it's probably better if you get really specific and just search a couple of different ways rather than trying to get complicated with a logical disjunction. Other numbers that appear in series are telephone extensions. If you know one number inside of a corporation you can find a range of other people that might be in that same department by using the 80 to 200 to , for example, range of numbers which you'll find all the extensions on there that have been listed out on the web somewhere. Physical addresses work much the same way. The other thing you can do with this is you can simply use any number, like for example the years of employment 2001 to 2005,

10 or the years of graduation, 1995 to 1999 for example. These can all be used as ranges. What other numbers do you think you can use in a range search like this? And if you're thinking social security numbers or credit card numbers actually you're right but kidding aside that's not something that would be productive for us as recruiters so what else besides phone numbers and zip codes and how many people we managed can you think of that would allow you to find content specific to recruiters that something we would find very useful? Give it some thought. Play around with this. This is a very powerful technique. Transcript for page 10, Google Maps The map, the Google map is in fact kind of a mash-up. That is a way to describe content that's being brought together from different sources. The mash-up in this case is the geographic data that Google keeps which is extracted from things such as city and state, zip codes, addresses, area codes and IP addresses and also the main index or the main data that Google has. So if you just searched on Google.com for a sentence or a phrase or a bullion syntax or a logical disjunction you would only find those words on pages. But if you use that same exact search on maps.google.com and added a city and state or just a state or even a zip code, you can even be very specific and add an address, any one of those combinations will get you results exactly like Google.com would with the same kind of content but refined or narrowed down by overlaying it on the actual geographic location. So you could very easily search for locations of a business, say IBM in Atlanta, Georgia and find all of the IBM branches listed on Google in very different ways. It could be because IBM themselves listed it, it could be mentioned by somebody else, it could be on a blog, anywhere you can find that. You can also do a search for software engineer resumes in Atlanta, Georgia and you'll find resumes with the geographic slant of being hosted or having an address inside of Atlanta somehow. One of my favorite examples is to use action words, sort of like the natural phrase when people talk about what they do. I manage people, or I manage engineers or I submit

11 documents for audit. So when you use words like that in geographic search you'll find interesting results. It'll actual triangulate sometimes content from a third-party so you're not getting just one page, you're getting text from one page that points to another page and as an extension you might find the content in that other page is really useful. For example, you'll come across a listing of events taking place at a hotel, you'll have found the original listing is pointing to the hotel but when you click on that link it takes you back to the event page that now you know takes place in that hotel. So you put two and two together and you actually have effectively done a geographic search for events even though you didn't specifically ask for that. There's a lot of other surprises like that. So try any search that you've already had success with in regular Google search and add that geographic layer and play around with different variations of it. Transcript for page 11, Google Books Although intuitively it doesn't make sense for books to actually include magazines, if you go to books.google.com it searches print publications that are in the book bound format as well as the journal format which could be an electronic publication, such as a PDF newsletter for example, as well as print. Google has taken on themselves to index or scan and catalogue a lot of content and you can search the body of that content with books.google.com. All you have to do is go on the left hand side and specify a few things and this is one of those examples where it's probably easier if I visually show you but you can choose a journal such as US Black Engineer and IT and do a very effective search for engineers that are diverse or of diverse ethnic background and it even tells you where they work. So you've got top employers and top people, in this case these are award winning black engineer of the year winning engineers at companies like Northrup Grumman and the Navy and Lockheed, etc. Pretty useful stuff but even better if I show you live so let's do that.

12 Transcript for page 12, Google Books Video To get to "Books", you can use the "More" link over here or if you want, just manually type it in. You can certainly type in "Books.Google.com". Once you get there, you will see there's an "Advance Search" option, but before you get to books, it asks you if you actually buy some books or do you want to browse books and magazines. The choice that you want is the one on the left. The one on the right relates to buying things, like itunes, so you'd be buying Google ebooks, types of content or of course, you could go to a library of books you've already bought. You might be a customer already, but what we really want to do now is browse books and magazines. One of it says "Books and Magazines." Well, from here, we can check the "Advanced Books Search" and you'll see, it gives us the option to limit our content to magazines. So we'll type "Software Engineer", which is the example used in the module as the exact phrase, so it'll put it in quotes; "Software Engineer". You can also use all of the words too. Do a regular Boolean search with logical disjunction. We'll specify in this case, black engineer although, you could leave that out and just simply see what's out there for software engineer and you can narrow it down by specific dates. So if you don't want to get results from the 1900's, the last millennium, you can limit your search to be at least January 2008 and present. And we will search and you see a couple of results. Here's 2008, 2009, and 2010 version of "US Black Engineer and IT" and if you click on any one of these it will bring you to a graphical image of the magazine, and in it you will find Black Engineer of the year awards, which is a section that they put out once a year and it gives you the names, it tells you what they do and where they work, which is more than enough information for us. You can see it's often 2 or 3 pages and it has really good content. Now there's other things in this magazine. There's people being mentioned in many other ways as well. So this isn't the only way to search for people, but you can use other kinds of titles and other kinds of publications as well. Very very effective. Now you have a name, title, location and company. Sometimes you might not have a

13 location, but you have name, title and company; very easy to do a Google search for that name and company and you'll find out other information about them. Keep in mind that it is indexing the PDF versions and sometimes scanning in print versions of magazines, so there are a few kinds of scanning or optical character recognition issues. But by in large, if you keep it simple to a job title and a company name, you get some very good results. Transcript for page 13, Knowledge Check Introduction Thank you for your attention. Before continuing on to the next module you'll need to complete a Knowledge Check. If you'd like to review the module content before beginning the Knowledge Check, simply click the Back button to return to a previous page or navigate using the Menu button to any of the pages in the module. If you feel you're ready for the Knowledge Check, click Next and the Knowledge Check will begin.