Google Secrets Revealed
By Bob Rankin
Put the world’s largest search engine to work for you with these secret tips.–PC Pitstop.
Are you getting the most out of Google Search? Sometimes the standard search strategy – “just type in a few words” – doesn’t yield the optimal results. You may get too many results, or marginally relevant ones. The true disciples of Google Fu know the following secret ways to get exactly what they want from the world’s largest search engine…
Operator, Can You Help Me WIth This Search?
Operators (hat tip to the late, great Jim Croce) are symbols that tell Google to perform certain operations on a word or words. Inserting a minus sign immediately before a word, for instance, tells Google to delete all search results that contain that word. Enclosing multiple words in quotes means “treat these words as one word.” A plus sign immediately before a word or quoted phrase tells Google to present all search results that contain the word or phrase, regardless of other considerations that might cause a result to be omitted.
At the top of every results page, you’ll find “Search tools.” Click that to refine your search by date, type of page, or location. I find the “Any time” dropdown useful in the Search Tools menu. You can change that to Past hour, Past week, Past month, Past year, or a custom date range, if you’re looking for something that happened within a specific time period. The Search Tools “All results” menu also lets you choose the reading level of search results, so you can avoid Ph. D. dissertations on folklore when seeking bedtime stories.
Less Searching, More Answers-Article Continued Here
Excerpt shared with permission from Bob Rankin.
