Queries that find

This rule is hardly ever used. Few even know about it. It's not for simple searches. As for the complex ones, heedless searchers do not even suspect the amount and quality of information they miss. There is a better way to search the Web.

How to visualize something that you have never seen? Let us use an example. We'll start with a search result and proceed backwards.

Supposing we searched for official information on stem cell research in U.S. and knew that The National Institutes of Health (NIH) should have it somewhere on their website. The search statement was something like this:

"stem cell research" "federal policy" us intitle:nih

The first link in the results list was to the web page shown here. Red circles mark keywords and phrases matching those in the original query. Some of them may occur several times.

To visualize the result is to "see" an ideal web page with keywords in it.

Now, back to visualization. As you can see in the picture, keywords may be located in different parts of the web page.

Visualizations range from a very vague perception of one keyword somewhere in the page to a distinct picture of a constellation of keywords and phrases firmly set in certain components of the web page. Know-how web search is all about words and their positions.

Next, you need to translate your vision into a search query. The query is built according to a search engine rules so that the engine can "understand" it. The search engine has to "know" what to do with the keywords that you have selected, how to process them. It needs commands.

This Use Simulator is about creating queries in Google.