In my last post I said I would provide some tips on getting the best out of Google Groups and finding what you’re looking for. But first off let’s start with a few general search tips. Google themselves provide some helpful guides on using the regular Google search engine:

Basic Tips:
http://www.google.com/help/basics.html

Advanced Search:
http://www.google.com/help/refinesearch.html

These guides are well worth reading. There’s lots of stuff on the Advanced Search page that are easy to overlook and can be very helpful in narrowing down your search. For example, you can limit your search to a particular domain. I often use this for searching for answers on Microsoft’s site. E.g.:

“not allowed in this context” site:microsoft.com

Note that the advanced search simply adds information to the regular search query. To search within a domain it simply adds the “site:” attribute to the search term. You can add this yourself in the regular search box. You can also exclude results from certain sites:

“Macro Scheduler” -site:mjtnet.com

Note the use of the quote marks to search for a specific phrase. In my first example above I wanted to find pages on microsoft.com that contained this error message. So I needed to use the quotes.

Google Groups searches Usenet messages. It works in much the same way as Google. But since Usenet consists of a huge array of groups spanning all manner of topics it is often necessary to narrow your search down to within certain groups. Consider this Google Groups search:

create recordset

The first page of results consists of messages from various groups covering VB, SQLServer, MS Access, Dreamweaver and Ultradev. What I really want to do is find out how to create a record set in VBScript. In much the same way the regular Google search lets you search within specific domains, you can search within specific groups:

create recordset group:microsoft.public.scripting.vbscript

This searches only within the microsoft.public.scripting.vbscript newsgroup. But there are other groups that discuss VBScript. And what if you don’t know what they are called? Well, you can use wildcards:

create recordset group:*vbscript*

This returns a much more targeted, useful set of results from various VBScript groups. Definitely my most used search construct.

Hope this helps!

This entry was posted on Friday, August 25th, 2006 at 2:26 pm and is filed under General, Web/Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.