Is Google a gift or curse?

What’s the first thing that comes to your mind? Google! Believe it or not you are not the only one hooked to this creation, in fact you merely constitute 82 percent of Google’s market share.
Most Zimbabweans have swiftly adapted and are totally dependent on this search engine. Many people think if Google does not find what they are searching then the information is not online.

Can we solely rely on Google search results? Does Google really store up everything if not anything at all? No simple article can really answer this mystery without digging into the geeky terms that run the backbone of search engines.
No doubt, Google is currently the world’s best search engine and has been holding on to that position for 11 years now. By Google I will be referring to its search engine not the company. There are many search engines out there but let’s simplify things.

A search engine is a program that searches information from the web or ftp servers, the results are presented in a list and are often called hits.
Contrary to what most folks think, Google does not originate or store up data. It actually searches or crawls data from other websites, then it links or indexes the user to the results, prior to that it caches or stores up parts of some web pages for users to easily access especially the most popular and the previously viewed websites.

Google did not originate the search engine technology, it only modified and perfected where competitors were lagging. Ten years ago when I was still a high school student, I was so impressed with Altavista and Yahoo that I never bothered to try Google but come today I’m afraid it’s completely the opposite.
The first search engine was Archie, short notation for archive. They simply searched file names and titles and this was limited to headlines of online articles but not the wording inside a web page and gave birth to w3catalog, the web’s first search engine in 1993.

Jumpstation was the first to come in with three vital features of web searching thus, crawling, indexing and searching although it was limited to the titles and headings found in the web page. WebCrawler technology allowed any user to search any word in any webpage, this opened a complete world of other players especially Infoseek, Ask, Lycos, Altavista, and Yahoo.
Netscape came in 1996 to promote these web search engines on its home page for a whopping US$5 million a year and proved to be a good marketing strategy.

Yahoo bought in Altavista and Alltheweb in 2003 but failed to move Google off its position. Microsoft launched MSN in 1998 and rebranded it to Bing in 2009. Microsoft and Yahoo joined hands where Microsoft then powered Yahoo search. With all these collaborations Google remained amazingly unshaken. Recently Microsoft has been making an average quarterly loss of US$278 million, maybe it was just a little late for these giants to fight a monster they had created through their own weakness.

Google owns 82 percent of the market share, Yahoo battling with 6 percent and Baidu which is more popular with the Chinese with a meagre 4 percent and the rest share the spoils unevenly.
Since 2000 Google came through with its search engine and rose to prominence, it shipped in special features like page rank and web crawler, it ranked pages on the ratings of other associated web pages and those linked to other different sites.

I personally think to date, this is a powerful tool which has led many website owners to seriously market their products online better than others and has upped the tempo on online marketing. If you are serious about online marketing then it’s time you apply search engine optimisation techniques for best rankings. A website that is well optimised comes within the top 10 of search results hits.
A WebCrawler follows every link about a website that it then retrieves from the real web pages, this is then stored or indexed by the Google web servers. Part or the whole page may be stored and this is used as a cache so that you can even read the web page off from Google before you are actually redirected to the source.

The beauty and the beast of cached pages is that even when the web owners change or delete their online information, Google might still keep information, so when a user searches a word, a query is made directly to Google cached pages before it links out to the source.
To get more accurate results, you should type the exact words you want for the best matching results and a summary containing the document source and title will come up. The engines looks up for the word exactly as entered in the sequence you type, search engines which produce best results first are more acceptable.

Indexing your web browser will make it easily accessible and makes searching more relevant instead of relying on web searches. It gives the exact results than the generic ones. The purpose of storing an index is to increase speed and performance in finding relevant information, instead of the computer to search the whole storage. These indexes work just exactly like our traditional textbook index. Today websites with a Google search engine toolbar are ranked higher since they return much broader search results quickly due to indexing
Most users like me have searched for something on Google but could not get desired results. This is not a dead end, in fact it’s the first part of web searching. Whoever came up with this theory brainwashed people. Allow me at this juncture to introduce one more, but very important aspect on search engines, it is the hidden truth which most search engines are reluctant to comment much about, this secret has been covered in what is termed the “invisible web”.

The invisible web or deep web is information online which most search engines can only access at most 10 percent or below. Not even Google can crawl so much data from the invisible websites.
This is a shocking revelation considering that per every search hit you get you are actually missing out 90 percent of the information. It’s like trying to get all the fish from the ocean using a fishing rod!

The invisible web pages usually contain databases or personalised information, account data, PDF files, pictures. This is part of the internet that is not indexed or linked to any search engines. So how do I get this information from the invisible websites?

Personally, I get better results than what Google was trying to offer me and I am at ease to share these tricks most people have not yet discovered. You should use distinct words, specialised subject directory or blog. Most hidden information is stored under directories, so by simply including the word “directories” in your key words will bring up databases of certain directories which contains a compilation of dedicated information.

A directory is more specific than a general Google search. Visiting directories like about.com and Wikipedia will give you categorised best results submitted by experts in the field. Websites like ask.com where you specifically ask or type your desired question has been doing good to answer the question search engines could not.
Social network websites like Stumbleupon link you to relevant information you might be looking for, it is an active online webpage where people share ideas in realtime and chances are high you will ask people who have a previous experience about your problem or search.

The best social network that is taking the net by storm is Twitter. Twitter links you to most recent posts or events about certain activities and chances are high thousands of people are waiting to just respond to your need instead of wasting time flipping through web searching. Just tweet it and the world responds.

Social bookmark is where you share links across friends and work mates. These have categorised information thus you also do not need to search but just download the shared information. Other social networks are Scoopler, Reddit, Delicious and Dig. LinkedIn is also doing well but it is more business inclined than social, it is a better place to meet business associates.

Another giveaway tip is to try your search using Meta searchers. Basically this is a pre configured search engine which compiles and compares results of many combined search engines. They actually search the web search engines for you and you don’t need to swap or change your search engines. Meta searchers are very handy in that they actually search the popular Google, Yahoo and Bing then they produce the results.

This usually brings broader and longer results compared to traditional search engines but when in dire straits I would advise them. Popular Meta search engines are Dogpile, Clusty, Yippy, Surfwax. Just go to any of these dot com home pages and from there you can type your search.

Weblogs or website loggings are so helpful but I cannot be drawn to define them in this article, they deserve their own attention.
If you also enjoy interacting and getting help in realtime look for bloggers who have information about your questions, they are always online.

If you have tried all these tricks but failed, it is also wise to allow the search results to lead you. Maybe you are not typing better keywords. Most search results may not be exact but they are usually relevant, allow them to lead you.

The golden rule is, thou shall not only rely on Google. There are many ways out there to dig information especially as soon as Google has just failed you!