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, [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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The presentations I gave at International Librarian International this week in London are now available on my Advanced Search page at http://www.rba.co.uk/as/. They are also available on authorSTREAM and Slideshare. Searching without Google Presentation given as part of the main conference on Friday, 28th October 2011 It is also available on Slideshare at http://www.slideshare.net/KarenBlakeman/searching-without-google Web Search Academy [...]
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 [...]
Google first announced that it was introducing an option for users to exclude web sites from results in March of this year (Google lets you create your own naughty list http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2011/03/12/google-lets-you-create-your-own-naughty-list/). Then it disappeared, reappeared, disappeared and then reappeared for some people and only if you were logged in to a Google account. Now it [...]
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Google has been busy de-cluttering its web results page again. The ‘similar’ pages link disappeared from entries on the results page a while ago and was moved to the preview copies of results pages. Now the cached link has gone as has the magnifying glass for the preview. Hover over a result, though, and a [...]
Public Data Explorer has escaped the cull at Google Labs, from which it has now “graduated”. There were signs that it might survive when Google started adding public data charts to the top of the results for some statistics searches. It can now be found at http://www.google.com/publicdata/home. Public Data Explorer allows you to search and compare [...]
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Many of us have known for a while that the search engines, and in particular Google, customise results. What you see on your screen will not necessarily be what someone else sees on theirs even with what appears to be an identical search. Location, browser, search history, your browsing behaviour and your social networks are [...]
Continue reading about Google can seriously damage your news
