16 tips for advanced Google searches
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It looks inside personal profiles, member directories, scientific publications, court records and other such sources to find much more of any information about a person that’s online.
Other people search engines you can try are www. spock.com, www.yoname.com and http://wink.com.
14. Access the Deep Web
When you run a search, you’re only searching a tiny proportion of what’s really out there. This searchable portion is known as the Surface Web, and the rest of the information is known as the Deep or Invisible Web.
There are some alternative search engines that use special techniques to give you a degree of access to the Deep Web. The kinds of documents hidden in the Deep Web are often of a high quality, such as academic publications and information stored inside databases.
Depending on what type of information you’re after, there are various resources you can try. The Open Archives Initiative at www.oaister. org is a metadata harvester that works by amassing the descriptive data about Web sites.
Scientific information from US government agencies can be searched at www.science.gov. Also try Complete Planet (www. completeplanet.com), Mamma (www.mamma.com) and Intute (www.intute.ac.uk).
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15. Protect your privacy
Search engines keep a log of everything that’s typed into them.
Each entry is associated with a unique identifier, so if there were a data breach it could be possible for someone to string together your search history.
To keep things private, you need to log out of your Google account when conducting sensitive searches. You can also delete your cookies, but this will mean that sites that usually identify you, such as Amazon and iGoogle, will fail to do so.
A good resource is Scroogle, which enables you to conduct a Google search without having it linked back to you (http://scroogle.org).
16. Search for videos
We all think of YouTube when searching for videos, but Google Video is sometimes a better option because it’ll search YouTube as well as all its own content.
Furthermore, it doesn’t have the ten-minute time limit, so you’ll often be able to stream entire documentaries. Find out more at video.google.com.
Another useful video search engine is Blinkx at www. blinkx.com.