february 2007 MAXIMUMPC 55
how (^2) ImprovIng your pc experIence, one step at a tIme
Access the google
cAche
Google doesn’t search the actual
Web. Instead, it searches a copy it has
made of the Web. The copy is con-
tinuously being updated but always
remains a few steps behind the actual
Web. This fact can be useful in a num-
ber of ways. First, if you turn up a long
document and can’t find the bit that’s
relevant to you, click the Cached link
underneath the result. Your search
terms will be highlighted, so you can
scroll through and spot them easily. If
a link doesn’t work, click Cached to
see Google’s copy.
A particularly crafty means of
exploiting Google’s cache is to use it
to search a site that’s down. To do this,
type in your search terms followed by
the site:www.siteyouwanttosearch.com
modifier to limit the results to that site.
Now click Cached under the result you
want to bring up the page.
Even when a website is offline, you can view the most recent version of it
in Google’s cache.
You’re no doubt aware that most search
engines, including google, keep a
database of all the search queries they
receive. While this may pose a threat to
users’ privacy, the upside is that google
is developing a tool that enables anyone
to do their own statistical analysis of the
company’s search query database. With
a little imagination you can turn up some
superbly entertaining discoveries. go to
http://trends.google.com and type in up to
five search terms separated by commas
to compare how often those terms have
been searched for.
to obtain an idea of the fun that can
be had with this tool, enter “good, evil”
into the search bar. If you look at the
searches from all countries in all years,
you’ll see that people search for a lot
more good things than evil things.
Now use the drop-down boxes on the
top right to limit the results by country.
By choosing the United Kingdom, we can
see that the Brits are close to the global
average—for each evil search, they con-
duct about four or five good searches.
however, if we click to
see the same results
for the French, there
are only two good
searches for each evil
one. In early 2004, evil
searches in France out-
numbered good ones.
We’ll leave it up to
you to reach your own
conclusions on this
particularly interesting
finding....
the trends graph
often links news sto-
ries next to spikes in
search queries to try to
give an understanding
of why certain searches
occurred, but unfor-
tunately, some trends
remain unexplained. For
example, in sweden, circa August 2005,
we find that David hasselhoff was a hair’s
breadth from being as popular as Jesus.
globally and at all times, Paris hilton is
nearly as popular as god. these, and a
wealth of other fascinating revelations
about the human condition, are just a few
clicks away.
Explore Search Trends
Using Trend Search, you can see what people are
searching for on popular topics.