If you’ve been online for any length of time, you almost certainly are a bit of a Google expert. That is, you can go onto Google, type in whatever your search term may be, and quickly find the pages that are most relevant to you to help you with your online research.
Generally Google is a very good search for research because it has such a wide amount of the web well-indexed, and this will help you to solve your particular puzzle or conundrum. But Google can’t always be relied upon to give you an answer for every particular case. And there’s many reasons for that.
First of all, the material you want may not just be on the Internet. It may be, secondly, of a commercial nature. And, finally, it may be material that Google hasn’t indexed. How do we deal with each of these eventualities?
First of all, you may just be simply trying to find something that’s not on the Internet. Even in this modern age there are a huge amount of books which are not available on the Internet, even those which were published so long ago they’re out of copyright. You’ll never be able to find information for every particular source on the Internet. It’s just not likely and just not possible.
Imagine if the information you want is only available through watching a TV program. There’s a good chance that nobody has typed up a full transcription of that TV program and put it online for you to view. You’d have to go back and watch the original TV program or video recording of it in order to find the information you want. So if the material is not on the Internet, there’s nothing you can do to find it that way. You’ll have to revert to alternative offline sources to do so.
If the information is of a commercial nature, there’s a good chance you might not find it. And this may be because it’s information that’s commercially sensitive, but it may also be solely because the information is available, but you have to spend money to view it.
For instance, a printed book may not have an ebook alternative for you to read. The only way to do so may be to buy the physical book and spend the money to invest in your education. And that’s what something being commercial really means.
Of course, in that instance it may be possible to borrow the book from a library and so to reduce your investment required to access the information. But still, this would be an offline source, rather than using Google to access this commercial information. So if it’s only available for pay and there hasn’t been an online payment gateway set up to access information, you just will not be able to access it online.
Finally, there is a wide amount of information which is online, but Google has simply not added this information to its index. And the reasons for this should become apparent. It’s just not possible for Google to index every web page the very second it appears. So there will be a period between a website being put live — or a new page being added to a website — before it gets added to the Google index.
In fact, there are a lot of web sites that Google just doesn’t know about because it hasn’t found them when it’s been crawling the web through its spider. And these sites will never end up online, either. They may also be sites hidden behind a private database. For instance, if you have to pay to access this material, even though it’s on the Internet, then it may not be indexed by Google because this would make it freely available and no longer hidden behind this commercial wall. If it’s behind a logging site — even if it’s free — Google may again not be able to index it. So any information not indexed you may be able to find using alternative online search mechanisms, but not directly by using Google.
You should never expect that you’d be able to find anything you want using Google, so never leave research until the last minute, because you have to be able to consider alternatives if Google does not throw up exactly the results you want. When Google has not been able to access information because it’s not been placed on the Internet because it’s only commercially available, or because it’s just simply at a part of the Internet that Google can’t index, you too will not be able to access the results by searching in the Google search box. You’ll have to consider alternatives, such as going offline, or looking directly inside protected forums to find out the information you want.
If you can combine this with a good Google search strategy, you should be able to find valid information in an instant, on any occasion.