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Originally Posted by TadW
I am sure some of you have already tried using Google to find free e-books.
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Great link, thanks for sharing it.
Coincidentally, I just gave a class for 14 local businesses in my area on how to use search engines as a business and competitive-intelligence tool. Every single business was using search engines (primarily Google, MSN, and Yahoo!) as a monolithic tool to "find" stuff. They had no idea they could use it to actually promote their business and directly grow their business.
But all is not gold with Google. There are many things Google cannot do, that other search engines CAN do. The best way to use these tools, is to use them together.
Here are some quick examples of things Google
can't do (there are several others, but they're not necessary to explain here):
Google offers a 'link:<domain>' syntax, which can show you which sites link to that particular domain.
Here is one example, showing that 1,020 sites link to plkr.org. Running the
equivalent search at Yahoo! shows 11,300 results. The difference? Google only searches the
exact domain that you're searching for. Yahoo! searches every domain that includes that domain root in the search (
www.plkr.org,
code.plkr.org, and so on).
Unable to combine search synax with other parameters. You can't run something like:
link:plkr.org desktop to search for the term 'desktop' within all of the plkr.org domains. With Yahoo!, I can use that same syntax, to
return 1,870 hits.
You can't use very long queries with Google. Anything beyond 10 words, is dropped by Google. If you were searching for a very specific quote someone said, and using the -foo -bar +blort syntax to pare your search down, it would fail pretty fast, after 10 words. This is especially-true when you want to combine the previous kinds of searches into one query, such as: +"breast cancer" site:edu allintitle:research. It will run out pretty fast, and you won't get the results you want.
As someone who uses the Internet as a real research tool for a good portion of my job, these differences are very important for me.