Pro guide to Google searches. Part I » Our Picks - News, articles and reviews

Pro guide to Google searches. Part I » Our Picks - News, articles and reviews
credit http://brayn.our-picks.com/
Pro guide to Google searches. Part I
January 28th, 2007

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We all use Google every day, quite a few times a day even and most of us are very pleased with it. But are the results to your searches always that relevant!? Often you find irrelevant results and it takes you longer than it should to find what you want. But is this because of Google’s faulty search algorithms or is it because sometimes our searches can be ambiguous?

Well whatever the case after the Gmail search article I decided to expand the subject a little. I know some things you will find here you already know and some of them might be new for you. Anyway you can consider them as a reminder of what searching on Google really means.

I will start with the basic syntax that I am sure all of you know, but it’s the basis for further more complex syntax. For example:

You can search whole phrases by using quotes like “Rose Chappel” instead of plain Rose Chappel. The first query searches for the Rose Chappel and the second searches for the words Rose and Chappel.

I presume you also know about word exclusion, when you want to exclude a certain term from your search: PS3 -price. This will exclude all the results that contain the word ‘price’. You can do this with phrases also: PS3 -”technical specifications”. Note that there must be no space between ‘-’ and the word to exclude.

What you must know is that Google excludes by default some common terms like I, of, the, etc. If you ever need to make Google include a given term all you need to do is put a ‘+’ in front of it: +the tower. Note that, when words like these are included within a phrase search they are automatically included like: “the tower”.

Now lets talk about some more complex searches whit ‘AND’ & ‘OR’. By default Google includes all the terms in the search but you can specify that one word OR the other should be searched. To do this insert the capitalized OR in your queries: expensive (red OR green) dress. You can also replace the OR with “|” the so called ‘pipe’ symbol. Needles to say that you can use OR with exact phrase searches: “complete idiot”|”total idiot”.

Speaking of synonyms you can ask Google to search synonyms of a certain word you search by using the ‘~’ key. For example: ~wood is going to search for both wood, woods, forest, etc.

Another interesting trick that I’m not sure many of you knew about implies ranges of numbers. Say you want to purchase a computer monitor with a diagonal of 17” to 20” and a price ranging from $1000 to $1500, you can use: monitor 17..20 “price 1000..1500″. The ‘..’ operand tells Google that you are referring to a range of numbers, for the same example you can use monitor 17..20 “price ..1500″ to say the top price should be $1500.

Finally, to keep this article within reasonable margins I will conclude with the word wildcards. Google permits you to use wildcards in order to replace a part of word or even a whole word: sea* in order to search for seafood, seaside, seasick, etc. Also you can use ‘*’ to substitute whole words, such as: expensive “* dress” and you will find red, blue, short, ugly,etc dress. Keep in mind you can do this with several words by using more ‘*’ marks: the ** hood, so you can find the red riding hood.

As I was telling you at the beginning this might be common knowledge but it makes the basis of more complex searches you will find in Part II so stay tunned!

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Cheap Airline stuff (maybe helpful)

How to Get the Cheapest Flight Every Single Time
Credit
http://blog.auinteractive.com/how-to-get-the-cheapest-flight-every-single-time

January 3, 2007 at 1:11 pm · Filed under web 2.0, travel

Over the last year or two I’ve done my fair share of flying and have refined my methodology of making sure that I always get the cheapest airfare available. I wish I could tell you “use this one service,” but in reality it doesn’t work that way. Since there are so many variables at play, you have to run searches at a number of sites. So how do you get the best airfare?

Aggregators:

* Farechase
* Kayak
* Sidestep
* Farecast

Independent:

* Southwest

Booking Engines:

* Orbitz
* Travelocity
* Expedia
* Cheaptickets
* Hotwire
* Priceline
* Qixo

Major Airlines:

* Airtran
* Alaska
* America West
* American Airlines
* Continental
* Delta
* Frontier
* Jet Blue
* Midwest Express
* Northwest
* Sun Country
* Spirit
* U.S. Airways
* United Airlines

International Airlines:

* SkyScanner
* Momondo
* Mobissimo
* Trabber

There are basically three types of airfare websites: 1. Aggregators (ex: Kayak) that check airfares for many different airlines. They do not charge a fee but instead rely on affiliate hotel deals and on-site advertising like Adsense to make their money. These are historically the best bets. 2. Traditional booking engines (ex: Orbitz) that check multiple websites and take a small fee ~$6 in addition to the price of the flight. They process the sale on behalf of the airline and keep the fee. 3. Airline’s own websites (ex: JetBlue). If you find a flight on booking engines, check the airline’s own site so see if you can get it for the same price minus the booking fee. The important subset of this are airlines who do not play nice and do not offer their fares up to aggregators (ex: Southwest). You have to check their sites individually.

In my experience there is no ONE website that you can use to get the lowest airfare every single time. It fluctuates quite a bit because there a LOT of variables involved. Don’t ask me why - it’s just how it is.

My recommendation to get lowest airfare:

* Start with Farechase, Sidestep, Kayak, Farecast.
* Search Southwest and Jet Blue.
* Check the old-schoolers: Orbitz, Travelocity, Expedia.
* For good measure (and to be sure) check Cheaptickets, Hotwire, Priceline, Mobissimo, and Trabber.

You can also dig deeper using the quick list on the right. Try different days if you can (one day before/after), nearby airports (usually there’s a checkbox for that), and also check out building the flight with one-ways instead of round trip. This works especially if you have a 3-way flight or find that Southwest has a great 1-way price, but not roundtrip - then you can just use the other engines to get a cheap 1-way flight back.

If you feel really ambitious, check the airline’s own websites - list on the right (sometimes they’ll have unpublished deals).

When you find the cheapest flight that suits your needs, go ahead and book it. One of the things you’ll eventually run into is “oops, that $280 flight is now $320″ messages. It will annoy the hell out of you. But that’s just how it is. You might want to check the other aggregators - sometimes you can catch what you just missed on and one and find it on the other.

Since travel is a big industry, there are a lot of shady websites/clubs/etc. that try to get your email address or try to get you subscribed to some service. I’ve never found those very useful. The only exception is TravelZoo. I’ve signed up for their weekly Top 20 Travel deals email and I can say I’ve seen some impressive deals there.

Note: The above is mostly for US flights. If you’re looking for International, check out skyscanner.net, momondo.com, and trabber.com (non US). I haven’t tried them myself but I hear they’re good.

Feel free to share your flight booking strategies in the comments or give some travel tips of your own.