1. You may have encountered a squatter with an address similar to Google's. Occasionally, individuals will register domain names that are one letter off from a well-known URL in hopes of attracting those who make mistakes in their typing. Please be sure to enter www.google.com into your browser and the pop-ups may go away.

    

2. You may have encountered pop-up ads that are designed to be triggered by web searches performed. These tiny "time bombs" can be planted in your browser by any number of software programs that promise to enhance the speed or performance of your web browser. A brief description of these programs can be found in this article: http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,48177,00.html.
   
   If you are experiencing pop-ups generated by one of these malicious programs, you may need to remove it from your computer. One program claiming to perform this service is available at http://download.cnet.com/downloads/0-10106-108-63806.html. We have no relationship with the individuals who created this software and cannot vouch for it ourselves.

    

3. Another possibility is that you visited a site that launched pop-up windows in the background. These ads are known in the advertising industry as "pop-unders." When you came to Google, the windows may have become visible. Again, we do not condone this practice and do not allow it on Google.

If you'd like more information on the advertising we do accept at Google, you'll find it by visiting this page: http://www.google.com/ads/. We wish you luck in your quest to quell pop-ups.

How do I narrow my search?

Sometimes a search is in the right neighborhood but is overcrowded with too many irrelevant results. To refine your search, try doing a new search in which you add more words to your query. This will return a set of results that more closely matches what you wanted to find. You can also exclude words by putting the "-" operator immediately in front of each word you don't want to show up in your results.

How can I restrict my search to specific extensions, e.g., .edu?

Some words, when followed by a colon, have special meaning to Google. One such word for Google is the "site:" operator. To search a specific domain or site, use the "site:sampledomain.com" syntax in the Google search box.

For example, to find admission information on Stanford's site, enter:

If you would like to search for admission information on all educational domains, enter:

How do I stop my previous searches from appearing when I type in a new search term?

Fortunately (and unfortunately), this has nothing to do with Google. It's a feature of Internet Explorer 5.0, which is possible to disable using its menu. (You can verify this by going elsewhere on the web to fill out a form and then return to that same page on which you filled out the form.)

To disable this feature on Internet Explorer 5.0, go to the Tools menu; select Internet Options; select the Content tab. Within the Personal Information area, select AutoComplete. Click on Clear Forms. You can also uncheck the Forms box in this same window to keep this from occurring in the future.

Alternatively, you can delete individual entries from the history by using the Down arrow key to select a previous search, and then pressing Delete while an unwanted search is highlighted.

How can I set the default number of hits to 100?

Google's default (10 results) provides the fastest results. However if you know that you always want more than 10 results, you can visit our Preferences page and set the number of results to 20, 30, 50, or 100. You will get your chosen number of results for every search.

If you would just like to see more results on a per query basis, you can change the number of results when you search from our Advanced Search page.

How are query results listed?

Google's order of hits is determined by a combination of several factors, including PageRank priorities. Please check out our Why Use Google page for more detail, or take a look at Larry and Sergey's article The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine for pleasure reading.