Google Search Tips

Google Search Tips

Posted on: March 23rd, 2011

Google is my favorite online search engine. In my experience, it finds better, more relevant results than the other search engines. Many times using only a few words are enough but sometimes you need to fine tune your search to find what you are really looking for. I’d like to share some of it that I found useful.

Basics of searching

In order to be successful in finding what you are looking for you need to know some basics. These are actually work from most search engines, not just Google. You need to think a little bit with the “mind” of the search engine ;-)

Search engines look for words, not meanings. So the most important thing is to select the key words that will most likely to be part of the web page that you are looking for. Think of the words that are most likely to be in the text that you are looking for and least likely to be in other web pages. Generally a short but well selected search expression will give the best results. If you put extra words in the query, especially ones that are commonly used all over the web then you might be getting a lot of results that have little to do with what you want to find.

Uppercase and lowercase does not matter when you are searching. The search for Apple and apple will give exactly the same result. Also punctuation marks and characters like @,#,$,%,^,&,*,(,),=,+,[,],\, are ignored. So you can save on your keystrokes by leaving those out.

The dash ( ‘-’ ) between words are handled the same as space.

The sequence of the words is relevant. You’ll get different results (at least in a different order) if you change the sequence of the words. Also the singular and plural version of a word will yield different results.

Excluding Results That You Don’t Need

Many words have multiple meanings and because search engines look for words, not meanings, you might get a lot of results that are not relevant to what you are looking for. For example if you are looking for information on the fruit apple: if you just type in “apple” you will get a lot of results having to do the company named Apple.

The are two things you can do in this case. First is to add a word or words that are more related to the subject and help the search engine select pages that are more relevant to you. For example, expanding on the above, you might use the query apple nutrition or apple fruit which is going to give you information on the fruit rather than on the computer company.

The second choice is to specifically instruct Google to filter out pages that have a certain words in them. This feature is achieved by simply prefixing the unwanted words with a minus sign (it’s important to have a space before the minus sign otherwise it will be ignored). For example: if you search for apple -computer then you’ll get pages that have the word apple on them but not have the word computer. this will filter out most of Apple Computer, Inc’s web pages and you’ll get more pages that talk about the fruit rather than electronic devices. You can have many words to the be excluded. Eg: apple -computer -iphone

Searching for an Exact Phrase or Word

Google is pretty intelligently set up so that it not only searches for a particular word but also for its synonyms in order to find pages which on the same subject but use a slightly different wording. Most of the time this is very useful but you might be looking for something more specific. Maybe a quote from a person.

If you are searching for an exact phrase then you can put it in quotes. For example “it tastes like chicken”.

If you just need to avoid searching for synonyms for a word or two then you can prefix those words with a plus ( ‘+’ ) sign. For example +kid gloves

Search Within a Particular Website or Group of Sites

If you know that a the page you are looking for is on a particular website then you can use Google to find it for you. All you need to do is simply add the site:sitename as part of your search query. For example: buying new computer site:computerwizardindy.com which will search for any page on our website that’s about tips on buying a new computer. (note we got a search box right on the site but many site does not have one, or they don’t work too well).

Please observe that there is no space after the colon. Also you can omit the www or other prefixes from the website names. For example: site:hp.com will search both www.hp.com as well as support.hp.com and any other sites that has a name ending in hp.com. You can also just specify the very last part of a website name. Example: site:.gov which will only search US government websites.

Use Google as a Dictionary

If you type the word “define:” (with a colon at the end!) and then the word or phrase that you want to look up then Google will provide you with definitions for that word. Example: define: byte

In this case you can omit the space after the colon if you want.

Converting Units of Measurement or Currency

A recently added neat feature is the conversions that you can access very easily.

The format for this is “measurement-1 unit-1 in unit-2″. For example: 12 fl oz in cups which will convert the volume measurement. You can also convert temperatures, eg: 25 c in f will tell you 25 degree Celsius is how many Fahrenheit.

You can also use the same format to covert currencies. For example if you are traveling to Europe and want to find out about how much Euros you’ll get for $100 then you can just type in: 100 usd in euros which will give you a pretty good idea based on recent rate of exchange information.

Searching for Other Types of Information

Google started out just as a search engine for web pages but it has grown to include other types of information that might help you to narrow down what you need.

On top of the Google search pages you see the various categories:

Images, Videos, News, Maps, Shopping and more.

By clicking on those you can narrow down your search area. For example, you want to find a particular business near your location. If you go to Maps and then enter “business type near zip code” (eg: “chinese restaurant near 46037″) then you’ll get a better result than if you did a similar search on the Web. Similarly if you are looking for buying something and want to check out prices from various vendors then you can select Shopping and do your search under that.

Translation

Yet another very neat feature on Google is translation. Translation is under the “More” section or by going to translate.google.com. Here you can type in, or copy & paste the text you want to translate, select from which language to which language you want to translate (if you don’t know what the original language is then select Detect Language and Google will attempt to figure it out). You can also enter a website address and by clicking on the link generated you will be able to navigate that website in the language you selected.

But be aware that it’s a machine generated translation which frequently generates incorrect translations which are sometimes very funny!! But you can always get the general meaning at least from this type of translation.

Summary

This is just a fraction of the features that Google offer but I hope that I was able to provide some useful tips that will help you to find what you are looking for.