My daughter is a typical teenager – 15 years of hormone
fueled, facebook focused, and texting driven angst, who, although born as part
of the internet generation, is totally unaware of how to search efficiently and
quickly. The feeble cries of protestation of “I can’t find it anywhere” when a
school project forces her out of her comfort zone are an almost daily
occurrence.
So I did a little poll around the office and found out that
she wasn’t abnormal and that very few people seem to be aware of how Google,
for example, can help you drill down to get the specific information you want.
So I thought that a primer in basic search techniques was in order.
Google actually has over 40 modifiers to adjust and fine
tune your search results. There are also another 22 advance special features triggered
by keywords. You don’t have to know them all but some are very useful:
Search for an exact
word or phrase
You should know this already but if
you want to find the exact word or set of words put the search phrase in quotation
marks. It helps to sift the wheat from the chaff quickly.
Ex: "imagine all the people"
gets you the John Lennon song quickly
Exclude a word
To exclude a word from your search
query just put a dash (-) before the word you don’t want to search on
Ex: "imagine all the people"
–lennon and now you don’t have the song but something completely different.
Good for when you know that a brand name may be confused with a place name.
Search within a site
or domain
Lets say you want to search only
within a specific website you can use Google to define only this.
Ex: "imagine all the people"
site:cnn.com and you will get only the phrase as it was reported on
cnn.com. Important point is that there should be no space between site: and the
actual domain name. You can also define just a top level domain such as .gov or
.de as well (site:.gov)
Search within other Parameters
Link: If you type: link:www.cnn.com you can see who is linking to a
particular site.
Author: If you type: author:Charles Dickens it will return articles
authored by him.
Location: If you type: queen location:Holland
it will match the term “queen” with articles from Holland only
Define a word
If you want to know the definition for
a word or phrase then just put the word “define:” in front of the query.
Ex: define:marketing and you
have a quick definition together with
pages that relate to the word
Use a wildcard
If you can’t remember an exact
phrase but some of the words then use an asterisk (*) within a search as a
placeholder for any unknown terms.
Ex: "linkedIn and * b2b"
will give you various search phrases with options for the blanks. Great for
songs title where you can’t remember it exactly.
Search for either
word
If you want to search for pages
that have just one of several words, include OR (capitalized) between the
words. Without the OR, your results would typically show only pages that match
both terms.
Ex: Winter olympics 2014 OR 2018
will give you results on either of the terms.
Search for a number
range
This is great for finding a range
of numbers . If you separate the numbers by two periods (with no spaces) to see
results that contain numbers in a given range of things like dates, prices, and
measurements.
Ex: new convertible cars
$20000:$25000
Use Google as a calculator
Many people have no idea that you
can get the answers for most calculations simply by typing them in the search
bar.
Ex: 2^3(25+3^4) will give you
848 and a nice calculator will appear for simpler math. Use sqr
for square roots etc. It’s actually very handy.
So explore and have fun with this. You will be surprised how
much more you can get out of Google specifically if you know a little bit more.
