Typical Search: yesword -"no phrase"
Default Operator: AND
Boolean: +, -, OR, " ", * (wildcard word within phrase only)
Case Sensitivity: all text is treated as lowercase
Word Stemming: none
Stop Words: are used, prevent with +, eg world war +2; not needed within phrases. The can't be searched
Special Keywords: allintitle:, intitle:, allinurl:, inurl:, cache:, link:, filetype:, related:, info:, spell:, stocks:, site:
Index: Size is about 1.5 billion indexed and another .5 billion not yet indexed. Results include DMOZ categories, and sometimes news headlines
Unique: cache, PDF indexing and other filetypes, translation, maps, phone book, stock quotes, dictionary, site search, dynamic content indexing, more...
Customize: preferences, filter
More:
Google is now the most popular pure search engine, a well deserved title. Google gained fame for its PageRank technology, which ranks pages according to their popularity based on link analysis (see popularity ranking), however Google now has many other great qualities. They have gone farther than other major search engines to make the invisible web more visible: They index PDF, DOC, XLS, PPT, RTF, PS, and many other file formats, and are currently indexing dynamic content on a trial basis. There are fewer of these other file types, however they often contain quality information, and can be searched exclusively using the filetype: operator followed by the file type or using the selection box on this page. Google's index of websites is the largest of any search engine (although AllTheWeb hopes to top this). They are a privately held company, one of the few internet companies to be earning any money, and they do this with only minimal, text-based ads which are separate from the search results. Yahoo now uses Google for its web page results, unfortunately Google does not permit meta-search engines to include it. Google is beta testing showing thumbnails of websites on the results pages, and also has a great toolbar, an invaluable addition to the Internet Explorer browser.

This page was last updated on May 12, 2002. Submit changes here.