On March 1st a major change to how Google uses your search and personal information will be implemented. Under the innocent sounding title ”Updating our privacy policies and terms of service” (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/updating-our-privacy-policies-and-terms.html) Google announced in January that it is consolidating more than 60 privacy policies into a single main Privacy Policy. (You can preview the new [...]
Continue reading about Google personalisation: web history isn’t the only problem
UKeiG organised a workshop on Google, which was held on 8th February 2012 and hosted by Birimngham University. (My slides for the day can be found on authorSTREAM and on Slideshare). Twenty-two people from a variety of backgrounds and sectors attended the event and their combined Top 10 Tips are listed below. 1. An understanding of [...]
Continue reading about Top search tips from UKeiG Google workshop
Sixteen people attended the two half day search workshops that I ran on Monday, 6th February 2012. As usual, I asked them at the end of the session to come up with a list of what they thought they would find really useful. Below, in no particular order, is a combined list of top tips. [...]
Many of us have been saying for a while that the search engine that will kill Google is Google itself. It has come so close in the past, two of the more recent incidents being the removal of the plus sign from general web search and stopping the ‘ANDing’ of search terms. Prefixing search terms [...]
Continue reading about And the next Google killer is….Google!
Well, the proverbial has hit the fan with Google search getting really personal (Official Google Blog: Search, plus Your World http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/search-plus-your-world.html). Good news or bad news? A bit of both. It’s great for tracking down information or a comment made by someone within your personal social networks but a disaster if you are conducting serious, [...]
Continue reading about Workshop (Birmingham): How to make Google behave
I travel a lot for both business and leisure and I use public transport whenever possible. The plus side to this is that if it is a longish journey – for example Reading to Manchester – I can settle down on the train and get on with some work. The down side is that I [...]
Continue reading about Google Transit takes the scenic route
Google has started showing UK postcode area boundaries but not in Google maps as one would expect. Using the standard Google search box type in your postcode and at the top of your results Google shows you a map with the boundaries of the postcode area. Although the boundaries are in roughly the right area, [...]
Continue reading about Google shows postcode boundaries – sort of
Well it looks as though the user feedback to Google on the discontinuation of the +/plus sign for enforcing an exact match search has paid off. Google removed the plus sign as a web search option a few weeks ago and told searchers to use double quotes around terms instead.The double quote marks option does [...]
Continue reading about Google: Verbatim for exact match search
I have been complaining for several months that Google does not always “AND” your search terms and delivers results that do not contain all of your terms, or their synonyms, in the page itself or in links to the page. There was a time when you could force Google to deliver exactly what you wanted [...]
Continue reading about Dear Google, stop messing with my search
You will either have read about this on other blogs or found out yourself when searching that Google has dumped the ‘+’ operator. This was a useful way to stop Google automatically searching for variations and synonyms of your terms. The theory was that by prefixing your term with a plus sign Google would be forced [...]
