As we said before in Question Answering System Phases that the second phase in an question answering system is passage retrieval. A query would be pass to GOOGLE to become documents that should contain the answer.It is recommended to pass a well formed query, so we will use GOOGLE advanced search to get a well formed query.
Some advanced Google search tips:
Google ignores common words and characters such as where, the, how, and other digits and letters which slow down your search without improving the results. We'll indicate if a word has been excluded by displaying details on the results page below the search box.
With Advanced Search, you can search only for pages that:
- Contain ALL the search terms you type in.
- Contain the exact phrase you type in.
- Contain at least one of the words you type in.
- Do NOT contain any of the words you type in.
- Is written in a certain language.
- Is created in a certain file format.
- Was updated within a certain period of time.
- Contain numbers within a certain range.
- Within a certain domain, or website.
- Don't contain "adult" material.
You can also improve your searches by adding "operators" to your search terms:
1. Include search “+”:
If a common word is essential to getting the results you want, you can include it by putting a "+" sign in front of it. (Be sure to include a space before the "+" sign.).
2. Terms you want to exclude (-):
Attaching a minus sign immediately before a word indicates that you do not want pages that contain this word to appear in your results. The minus sign should appear immediately before the word and should be preceded with a space.
3. Fill in the blanks (*):
The *, or wildcard, is a little-known feature that can be very powerful. If you include * within a query, it tells Google to try to treat the star as a placeholder for any unknown term(s) and then find the best matches. For example, the search [ Google * ] will give you results about many of Google's products (go to next page and next page -- we have many products).
4. Synonym search (~):
If you want to search not only for your search term but also for its synonyms, place the tilde sign (~) immediately in front of your search term.
5. OR search
To find pages that include either of two search terms, add an uppercase OR between the terms.
6. Domain search:
You can use Google to search only within one specific website by entering the search terms you're looking for, followed by the word "site" and a colon followed by the domain name.
7. Searching for related websites:
related:www.wikipedia.org
8. Numrange search:
Feel like a number? Numrange searches for results containing numbers in a given range. Just add two numbers, separated by two periods, with no spaces, into the search box along with your search terms. You can use Numrange to set ranges for everything from dates ( Willie Mays 1950..1960) to weights (5000..10000 kg truck). But be sure to specify a unit of measurement or some other indicator of what the number range represents.
9. Phrase search (""):
By putting double quotes around a set of words, you are telling Google to consider the exact words in that exact order without any change. Google already uses the order and the fact that the words are together as a very strong signal and will stray from it only for a good reason, so quotes are usually unnecessary. By insisting on phrase search you might be missing good results accidentally. For example, a search for [ "Alexander Bell" ] (with quotes) will miss the pages that refer to Alexander G. Bell.
10. Phone Listing:
Let’s say someone calls you on your mobile number and you don’t know how it is. If all you have is a phone number, you can look it up on Google using the phonebook feature. Example: phonebook:617-555-1212 (note: the provided number does not work – you’ll have to use a real number to get any results).
11.Area Code Lookup:
If all you need to do is to look-up the area code for a phone number, just enter the 3-digit area code and Google will tell you where it’s from. Example: 617.
12.Stock (Ticker Symbol):
Just enter a valid ticker symbol as your search term and Google will give you the current financials and a quick thumb-nail chart for the stock. Example: GOOG.
12. Calculator:
The next time you need to do a quick calculation, instead of bringing up the Calculator applet, you can just type your expression in to Google. Example: 48512 * 1.02.
13.World Time:
Time cityname.
14. Mathematical Calculations:
جتا(10) , cos(10)
15.Title Search:
If you are tired of the search farm results with their useless keyword stuffed articles, you can choose to search the titles instead for better results. intitle:tips for interior design
16.URL Search:
URL search works the same as Title Search except for the fact that the words in the URL (Permalinks) alone are searched. inurl:tips for interior design
17.Finding Weather:
Weather reports for your local city or for any city in the world can be found using the following search string. Example: weather القاهرة
18.Maps:
maps: مصر
