A while back someone posted how they searched for diploma mills on the net and what universities hired people with milled degree's by putting the name of diploma mill along with .edu in a google search box. I don't remember the syntax of that search. Do you?
I think that you are making this more difficult than it is. Just go to Google's advanced search page here: http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en Then use your common sense and a little trial and error. When I google, I'm generally more interested in signs of intellectual life than in graduates' resumes. But the principle is the same. You can google for the school's name. The exact phrase field works best. (It searches for pages containing that exact text string.) Sometimes it helps to do it several times using variant forms and spellings. ('UC Berkeley', 'University of California Berkeley') With degree mills, that kind of search will mostly turn up junk. Lots of these schools appear on lots of marketing sites that don't tell you very much except that the school promotes itself. If you want to see how the academic world is responding to a particular school, try googling the school's name while restricting the search to .edu domains. (Specify that in the 'domain' field.) That will turn up your faculty listings, plus the kind of things I look for like visiting scholars, collaborative programs, citations of research and so on. If the topic is something like test pilots or military science offerings, you might want to try .mil and .gov sites. What I want to see is whether the school is getting any recognition from professionals, and if so, what they are saying. Occasionally it's kind of fascinating. A search on .org might turn up professional organizations. If you have a specific one in mind, put its url in the 'domain' field (ieee.org for example, to see what the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers has to say about a particular school). If you are investigating a British offering, try .ac.uk. I usually do that anyway. Try .ca or .au or .ac.jp, if it seems like a good idea. Sometimes you get too many results. When I google 'University of the West', I get countless irrelevant hits for 'University of the West Indies, 'University of the West of England' and for a 'University of the West' in Romania. So, I put 'indies', 'england' and 'romania' in the 'without these words' field. Maybe I want to see what a school is doing in a specialized subject. In that case I put 'Knightsbridge University' in the 'exact phrase' field and 'astronomy' or 'military' in the 'any of these words' field up on top. It's actually fun to play with it and see what you get. Try it different ways with different schools.
Some mills use the .ac (Ascension Islands) domain If you want to search for people or mills try www.zoominfo.com
True... you could use that, but it's imprecise. It's important to remember that the advanced search page is nothing more than a user interface. There's no magic there. Nothing happens through it which cannot be better done through keying the search terms in to the regular search box using the proper syntax. I'm not saying, by the way, that there's anything wrong with using the advanced interface. It really does save the user from having to remember syntax. I mean... you're dead-on correct about that. But the syntax is so logical once one understands it; and so much more precision and customization is possible... I dunno... I guess I just think taking a lousy couple of hours once in a person's life to completely understand Google syntax can make a huge difference in a person's educational or work experience. It's just an opinion, of course. Remember that the advanced search interface is nothing more than a tool for building a finished text string that will end-up being typed into the Google search box. The "exact phrase" field simply means that whatever is typed into it will end-up in the finished text string with quotes around it. Typing University of California into the "exact phrase" field of the advanced interface accomplishes exactly the same thing as typing "University of California" (including the quotation marks) into the regular Google search box. In the search string found in the post to which I linked in my previous post, I achieved more precision, and included more possible alternate spellings of St. Regis in a single search than would normally have been possible by using Google's advanced interface's "exact phrase" field by putting quotes around each possible way of spelling St. Regis, and then joining them together with Google's "OR" operator... as in: "saint regis university" OR "st. regis university" OR "st regis university" which will search for not just the one way of spelling it, but any of the three ways that it happens to find, and then it will return any of those ways in the search results pages. The advanced interface's "exact phrase" field can't do that with that kind of precision. Typing something into the "domain" field in the advanced interface is exactly the same as using the "site:" advanced operator in the regular Google search box. To limit my St. Regis search to only those web sites which utilize the .edu top level domain (TLD) in their web site URLs, I would simply add site:.edu to the aforementioned search string, as in: "saint regis university" OR "st. regis university" OR "st regis university" site:.edu which would be the same as typing ".edu" into the "domain" field in the advanced interface. True. Using my method, that simply means using ".mil" instead of ".edu" with the "site:" advanced operator, as in site:.mil. site:.org site:.ac.uk or site:.ca or site:.au or site:.ac.jp. My way, it's as simple as using quotes around the desired phrase and putting a plus sign in front of it to indicated that you want that, no matter what; then using minus signs in front of all the undesired words, as in: +"university of the west" -indies -england -romania - OR - +"university of the west" -indies OR england OR romania The former would work for sure; and the latter should work, theoretically. The proper syntax to achieve exactly that would be: +"knightsbridge university" +astronomy OR military which could then be limited only to web sites utilizing certain TLDs by simply adding the "site:" advanced operator to the string. True!! Actually, the "site:" advanced operator must precede the ".edu" part, as in site:.edu. The text string I specified in the post to which I linked you is literal and is exactly what must be typed into the Google seardch box, including punctuation, spacing and capitalization exactly as you see it in: "saint regis university" OR "st. regis university" OR "st regis university" site:.edu Remember that using Google effectively is an exercise in logic and common sense... as Bill said. It's about predicting how what you're looking for will appear on the web pages you seek, then asking Google to find it. You must consider that not everyone may put it on the page the same way; that there could be misspellings, or improper use of punctuation or spacing, etc... hence the three different ways that I specified St. Regis in my string, above. Others could be added, using more "OR" operators, of course, to separate them. Anyone who's deadly serious about becoming a Google expert should set aside some time to read every last word at: googleguide.com and everyone who uses Google should print-out this quick reference and keep it handy at all times.
