Google Guide

A guide for users of the Jaws screen reader, written by David Bailes. More guides are available on the Jaws Guides page of the VIP Software Guides website.

Contents

• Introduction
• Entering your search terms
• Search Results
• Type of content
• Search tools
• Search terms
• Search settings

Introduction

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

Landmark regions

To aid navigation, Google's result pages contain landmark regions. To move to the next or previous landmark region press R or Shift + R respectively. And to move to the main landmark region, press Q. Landmark regions are described in more detail in the Landmark regions section of the separate HTML Page Navigation Guide.

Outline

This is an outline of searching using Google:

1. Enter one or more search terms. This can be done either on Google's website or in a web browser's search box, as described in the next section. Often the search terms are simply one or more words, but more advanced options are available, as described in the Search terms section.
2. After you've entered the search terms and pressed Enter, you're taken to the first page of the results. Here you can browse through the results and open a link to any you're interested in.
3. Optionally, from the results page you can customize and filter the search results. For example, you may be only interested in pages which have been created or updated in the last week. This is described in the Type of content and Search tools sections.

An example

As a simple example of a search, assuming that you've set your browser's home page to be the Google website, then to search for the freedom scientific website:

1. Press Alt + Home to move to your home page, which you've set to be the Google web site (www.google.com).
2. The initial focus is the edit box for your search terms. If necessary press Enter to go into Forms mode, type in the two words freedom scientific, and then press Enter.
3. You're taken to the first page of the results. Press Q to move to the main landmark region, and then press H To move to the level 1 heading, Search results.
4. The search results are grouped into one or more groups. Each group starts with a level 2 heading which describes the kind of results in the group, and each of results in a group starts with a level 3 heading, which is also a link. Freedom scientific is a popular site, so you'll find a link to its website in the first group of results.

Help

To access Google's help pages, open the Help link on any results page.

Entering your search terms

You can enter your search terms either on Google's home page, or in a web browser's address bar or search box, and these are described in the next two sections. Once you've done a search and are on one of the results pages, you can also enter some new search terms there, as described in the search results section.

Using 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 be 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 necessary 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.

Using the Address bar or Search box in your web browser

Provided that the search provider in the browser has been set to Google, then:

1. Press Ctrl + E to move to the Address bar or Search edit box, depending on which browser you've using.
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. On this page you can browse through the results, and open the link to any results which you're interested in. Optionally, you can also start another search, and customize and filter the search results.

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 Search settings 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:

• Accessibility links level 1 heading
• Search landmark region, which contains a search edit box. This contains your current search terms, and can be used for starting another search.
• Navigation landmark region, which is preceded by a Search modes level 1 heading. This region contains controls for specifying the type of the content which is searched, a settings menu button, and a Tools button. All of these are described later in the guide.
• Main landmark region, which starts with a Search results level 1 heading, and which contains the main search results.
• A second navigation landmark region, which starts with a page navigation level 1 heading, and contains links to further pages of search results.
• There may be a Complementary results level 1 heading. Sometimes google provides information from various sources, based on your search terms. For example, if you search for a well know person, google may provide some information about them.

Navigating the search results

Quick ways of moving to the search results include:

• Press Q to move to the main region, and then press either 1 or H to move to the level 1 heading search results.
• Press 1 until you get to the level 1 heading Search results.

The search results are grouped into one or more groups. Each group starts with a level 2 heading which describes the kind of results in the group, and each of results in a group starts with a level 3 heading, which is also a link.

Examples of the kinds of results which google uses to group results include:

• Web results, which are just standard search results.
• Web results with site links. These results are provided for well used site, and consist of a standard result for the web site, together with results for pages within the web site.
• Other more specialized kinds of results, such as videos and local results.

So to move through the search results, press 2 to move to a group of results that you are interested in, and then press 3 to move through the results in that group.

If you need to move to the next or previous search result page, then you can press R to move to the navigation region which follows the main region, and then press H until you get to the next or previous links, which are also level 3 headings.

If Google has suggestions for corrections for any misspelled search terms these appear as a level 3 heading immediately after the first navigation region.

Search result format

The format of search results vary. The standard search results, which a appear in a Web results section, can be either web pages or files. If the result is for a web page, then the format of the result is normally as follows:

• A level 3 heading, which is also a link to the web page, whose text is title of the web page.
• The web address of the search result
• There may be a result options menu button. This opens a menu which includes the item cached, which takes you to a cached version of the web page, which can be useful if the web server is temporarily down.
• A short extract from the web page, which includes your search terms.

If the search result is for a file, then its format is similar. However, the type of the file, for example [pdf], is given immediately before the level 3 heading. The position of this isn't very helpful, as after moving to the heading of a search result, you have to read the lines before the heading to see if this information is present.

Starting a new search

You can use either of the two edit boxes on results pages to start a new search:

1. Press E to move to one of the edit boxes.
2. Press Enter to go into forms mode. The edit box contains your previous search terms, and the text is unselected. So if you want to overwrite this text, press Ctrl + A to select the text before typing in your new search terms, and then press Enter.
3. You're taken to the first page of the search results.

Type of content

There are options for the type of content searched for. The default type of content is All, which is everything on the web. To move to the type of content options, press R until you get to the first navigation region. The controls for setting the type of content are as follows:

• A number of tabs for the types of content which Google considers are most relevant to your search terms. All is always the first tab, and by default it's the selected tab. To select a different tab, you should be able to just press Enter, but unfortunately this does not work when Jaws is running. One way of working around this is to press Insert + Numpad Minus to route the Jaws cursor to the virtual cursor, and then press Numpad Slash to preform a left mouse click.
• A More menu button. Pressing this using Spacebar or Enter opens a menu of further options for the type of content.

Note that the settings of these options and the options described in the next section remain unchanged if you start another search using one of the edit boxes on a results page, but are reset to their default values if you use Google's home page, or your browser's search box.

Search tools

At the end of the first navigation region, there's a Tools button. This shows/hides a number of settings, and these vary with the type of content searched. For searches of type All, which is the default, then the settings include the time when the page was published: the default is Any time, and the other options include the past 24 hours, the past week, and the past year.

One way of getting to the Tools button is to press the letter R until you get to the first navigation region, and then to press B until you get to the Tools button. If you press the button then a number of menu buttons for the settings are displayed immediately after the button, and you're moved to the first of these menu buttons. To open a menu press Spacebar, and to move to the next menu button, press Tab. Note that after opening one of these menus, you can only navigate the menu items using Tab and Shift + Tab – you can't use the arrow keys.

Search terms

The default treatment of search terms is as follows:

• Search terms are not case sensitive.
• 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 whose addresses have a particular ending, you can use the site: operator. For example, you can include the search terms site:.gov or site:.gov.uk for searching government sites in the USA and UK respectively.

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.

File type

You can restrict the search to files of a specified type, by using the filetype: operator. For example, to search for pdfs or word documents, include the search terms filetype:pdf or filetype:doc respectively

Search settings

You can customize the search using the Search settings page. To get to this page:

• On a results page, move to the search settings button, which is near the top of the page. To do this you could press Ctrl + Home, then press the letter R until you get to the first navigation region, and then press the letter B until you get to the search settings button.
• Press the button. A menu opens.
• In the menu, choose Search options. You're taken to the Search Setting page.

The Search settings page includes the following items:

• Three tabs: Search results, Languages, and Location. By default, the Search results tab is selected.
• A number of settings for the selected tab. The section for each setting starts with a level 2 heading.
• Save and Cancel buttons. If you make any changes on the page, remember to press the Save button.

With the search results tab selected, which it is by default, the page includes the following settings:

• SafeSearch Filters. This is set using a “Turn on SafeSearch” check box, which by default is not checked.
• Results per page. There's a slider which allows you to set the number of results page, and to interact with it, you have to be in forms mode.
• Where results open, which is set using an “Open each selected search result in a new window” check box, and which is not checked by default.

You should be able to select another tab, by pressing Enter on that tab. However in some browsers, this does not work when using Jaws. You can work around this by pressing Insert + Z to switch the virtual PC cursor off, Tab to the name of the tab, press Enter, and then press Insert + Z again to switch back to using the virtual PC cursor.