VB Lecture Notes - Searching the Web

Objective #1: Use double quotes appropriately when searching Google and other search engines.

• When using Google.com to search for something on the Web, you can use double quotes around the phrase to improve your search results and save time.
  
  For example, if you search for      "Call of Duty"       with the double quotes you will only find web pages that have that exact phrase. If you do not include the double quotes, you will find web pages that may only have the word      Call        or web pages that only have the word        Duty.
  

Objective #2: Focus a Google search on one specific web site.

• Rather than being overwhelmed with millions of search results many of which are irrelevant, you can use Google to focus its search on one specific web site (i.e. domain like minich.com).  
  
  For example, if you wanted to search Google for one of Mr. Minich's vocab words such as "data type" in a way that only web pages at minich.com show up in the search results, you could type
  
  site:minich.com data type
  
  This will give you a list of individual web pages at minich.com that contain the word "data type" rather than pages at microsoft.com or apple.com that contain "data type".
  
  If you want to search for information about an iPhone but you only want pages from Apple's official company web site then you type
  
  site:apple.com iPhone
  
  Notice that you must type the word "site", a colon, the address of the company's home page, a space, and then the word or phrase that you want to search for.
  
  More examples:
  site:dccomics.com Batman
  site:nike.com "Air Max"
  site:youtube.com "funny videos"
  site:microsoft.com Xbox
  site:wikipedia.org France
  
  
• If you realize that Mr. Minich's website is organized into folder for his specific classes, there is an even better way to use this method to search for a specific vocab word. All of Mr. Minich's Visual Basic web pages are in a folder named "vb" that's contained in a folder named "wyo". The "wyo" folder is contained in a folder named "education". That is why the web page address
  
  http://www.minich.com/education/wyo/vb
  
  has slashes separating different words. For example, the page
  
  http://www.minich.com/education/psu/cplusplus
  
  is the home page for Mr. Minich's C++ (i.e. C plus plus) class at Penn State University (i.e. psu).
  
  So if you want to restrict your Google search to only pages in the VB section of Mr. Minich's website that contain "Button", you could search for
  
  site:minich.com/education/wyo/vb Button
  
  and you will then only have a list of web pages that are related to VB and not C++ or his teaching at Penn State!
  
  
• Another way to search for a specific vocab word that is only located at minich.com is to use the custom Google search at the bottom of Mr. Minich's Wyo Home Page (http://www.minich.com/education/wyo). In this case you only have to type in "data type" to the search box in order to find web pages within the minich.com website that contain data type.
  
  
• There are more interesting Google tricks at http://blog.simplek12.com/education/8-google-tricks-for-your-classroom/

Objective #3: Find words on a specific web page.

• Sometimes you need to quickly find a specific word or phrase on a single web page. You may not have time to read or even scan the web page. In that situation, you can use the Find command in the web browser. For example, in most web browsers you can press the Control-F key combination to reveal a textbox where you can type the word that you wish to look up.