Google Guide

A guide for Jaws users, written by Chorlton Workshop for hsbp.

Contents

• Introduction
• Searching
• Search Results
• Search terms
• Preferences

Introduction

A search engine is a program for searching the web for pages which are relevant to a set of search terms. There are lots of search engines available, but Google is usually considered to be the best general purpose search engine, and its web address is www.google.com.

Searching

There are two main ways of searching the web using Google: from a web page, and from a web browser's search box.

Using Google's home page

To search the web from Google's home page:

1. Go to Google's Home page which has the address www.google.com. You can either press Alt + D to move to the address bar, and type in this address followed by Enter, or if you've set Google to by your web browser's home page, you can just press Alt + Home.
2. The initial focus is the edit box for your search terms. If you're using Jaws 10 and have auto-forms mode enabled, then you're automatically taken into Forms mode. For earlier versions of Jaws, press Enter to go into forms mode. Type in your search terms, and then press Enter.
3. You're taken to the first page of the results of the search, which is described in the Search results section below.

The instructions above are for searching from Google's Home page, but you can also search from any search results page in a similar manner by using one of the search edit boxes on that page.

In many countries, there is the option of searching either the whole web, or only the web pages from that country. This option is set using a group of radio buttons which are a small number of Tabs after the Search edit box. The default option is the whole web, and if you set it to the pages from a country, this only applies to your next search.

Using the Search box in your web browser

The second way of searching using Google is to use the Search box in either Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox 3. Using the Search box in Internet Explorer 7, and managing its search providers is described in detail in the Search box section of the separate Internet Explorer 7 guide.

Provided that the current search provider for the Search box has been set to Google, then:

1. Press Ctrl + E to move to the Search edit box.
2. Type in your search terms and press Enter.
3. You're taken to the the first page of the search results, which is described in the next section.

Search results

After you've typed in your search terms and pressed Enter, as described in the previous section, you're taken to the first page of the results of the search.

The number of results on a page is 10 by default, but you can set this to any value you want, as described in the Preferences section below. Normally, useful search results occur within the first 20 to 30 results, so setting the number of results per page to 30 saves you having to navigate between the results pages.

The title of a search results page is the search terms dash Google Search, and the page includes the following:

• The level 1 heading Google, which is also a link to the Google home page.
• Search edit box containing the search terms.
• Preferences link. See the Preferences section.
• A group of radio buttons which allows you to choose between searching the whole web or just the pages from your country. These radio buttons may not be present in all countries. The default option is the whole web, and if you set it to the pages from a country, this only applies to your next search.
• Up to two sponsored links sections. Each of these starts with the level 2 heading Sponsored links, and is followed by a list of sponsored links. Each of these links consists of level 3 heading followed by a short description.
• The level 2 heading Search results, followed by a list of search results. Each result starts with a level 3 heading which is also a link. The full structure of these results is given in the Search result section below.
• The numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 etc which correspond to the page numbers of the search results pages. All except the page number of the current page is a link to that results page. In addition the links Previous and Next occur, when appropriate, before and after the the numbers respectively.
• Another Search edit box containing the search terms.

Navigating a search results page

To get to the level 2 heading “Search results”, you could press H to move to the level 1 heading Google, and then press 2 one or more times.

To move through the search results, you can either press H to move through the level 3 headings or press I to move through the list items.

If you need to move to the next or previous search result page, then you can use the links list dialog (Insert + F7) to quickly find the Next or Previous link.

Search result

A search result is normally for a web page, but can also be for a file – for example, a Word or PDF file. The format of a result for a web page is:

• A level 3 heading which is also a link to the web page, where the link text is the page title.
• A short extract from the web page which includes the search terms.
• The web address of the page.
• The size of the text on the web page, for example 18k.
• Cached link. A link to a version of the web page which was stored previously by Google. This can be useful if the web site in down.
• Similar pages link.

The format of a result for a file is:

• The file extension of the file, for example [DOC].
• A level 3 heading which is also a link to the file, where the link text is the file's title.
• The file format, for example Microsoft Word.
• View as HTML link, which takes you to a HTML version of the file.
• A short extract from the file which includes the search terms.
• The web address of the file.
• Similar pages link.

Note that if you are logged on to a Google account, for example Gmail, when you search, then additional links appear in each search result relating to Google's SearchWiki. After the level 3 heading there are normally promote and remove links, and after the Similar pages link there's a comments link. For more details open the Learn more link on a search results page.

Search terms

The default treatment of search terms is as follows:

• Search terms are not case sensitive.
• The web pages found by the search must include all the search terms.
• Automatic exclusion of common words. Words such as “where”, ”how”, certain single digits and single letters are excluded because they slow down the search without producing better results. If you need to include a common word, then you can use an exact phrase search, which is described below.
• Includes word variations. For example, if a search term is diet, then the word dietary will also be used as a search term.

Google provides several options for making searches more precise, and some of the most useful are described in the following sections.

Exact phrase search

To find pages which include an exact phrase, put quotation marks around the phrase. Note that your search terms can include other terms in addition to the exact phrase. Examples:

• “emily dickinson”
• “emily dickinson” biography
• “we all live in a yellow submarine”

Site search

To search a particular website, or websites whoose addresses have a particular ending, you can use the site: operator. For example “site:www.bbc.co.uk history” searches the BBC website for history, and “site:edu history” searches all websites whoose address ends in edu for history.

Negative terms

These can be useful if your search terms have more than one meaning. If you put a minus sign immediately before a term, then that term is avoided (You must leave a space before the minus sign). For example, “virus -computer” searches for virus but not computer.

Synonym search

To search for synonyms of a search term, rather than just the term, put a tilde (~) sign immediately in front of the term, and leave a space in front of the tilde sign.

Preferences

You can customize Google's search using the options on the Preferences page, and you can get to this page by opening a preferences link on either Google's home page or a search results page. If you make any changes on this page, remember to press one of the Save Preferences buttons.

The sections for each of the preferences begins with a level 2 heading:

• Interface Language. The default is English.
• Search Language. There is a a set of two radio buttons which allow you to specify whether you want to search for web pages written in any language, or only in a number of selected languages. Following the second radio button are large number of check boxes for specifying the languages you want, if the second radio button is selected. By default, the search language is set to any language.
• SafeSearch Filtering. There's a group of three radio buttons for adjusting the filtering of explicit sexual material. The default is the second option, which is filtering of images, but not text.
• Number of Results. There's a Display combo box which allows you to set the number of results on each page. The default is 10, but you might want to change it to something like 30, so that there's less need to have to navigate between pages of search results.
• Results Window. There is an option to display the search results in a new browser window. The default is off.