News

Google Tips

03/07/2007

As anyone that’s met me knows, I love Google. It’s simple, quick and accurate: what else could you ask for in a search engine? But most people enter a search term, hit the search button and click on one of the results, but there’s more to Google. If you to get the most out of Google, try some of these tricks out.

1. Ever wonder what the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button does? Simple, it takes you to the first result’s page. If you’re in hurry try it out
2. Try changing the order of the words you are search with. The results can be different and sometimes remarkably different
3. Type in a search word twice then three times. Google will weight the results differently depending on how many time the word appears on the site.
4. Consult the dictionary for more help on search terms. With the results page, at the top you’ll see something like “Google results 1-100 of about 63,700,000 for search. Search took 0.22 seconds.” The underlined word will send you to a dictionary website of that term.
5. Looking for an address? Type in the address (with the zip) and Google will give you links to map providers. Try looking up “1 Infinite Loop Cupertino CA 95014” to see where Apple’s headquaters are located.
6. If you type in a stock ticker, like “AAPL”, Google gives you chart links.
7. Most search results give back tens of thousands of results. If you don’t see what you’re looking for or unrelated results, try scrolling to the bottom and click on the “Search�within�results” link. This will allow you to search within the results already gathered. Also, if you’re seeing results that you don’t want, re-search but add a “-” in front of what you don’t want to see. For example, if you search for “Leonardo” thinking about Da Vinci but keep seeing results for “DiCaprio” re-search for “Leonardo -DiCaprio” and the actor’s pages will be filtered out.
8. The “Advanced Search” may seem intimidating at first, but it your search is not resulting in what you want it’s great. You can really narrow down exactly what you are looking for. Take a look at what the pull down menus choices give you. I actually use the “Domain” option all the time to search a specific site because many times it is better than the site’s own search engine. (PowerTip: From the main page you can do this by adding after your search term site:www.domain.com where “domain.com” is the site you are searching. All the modifiers can be found here)
9. Don’t forget about the Directory section. If you’re unsure of exactly what you want you can go through this directory structure to find out related sites
10. If what you are searching for is likely to have been in the news, try Google News since this will only search through the more current news related sites.

Hopefully this will help to make searching the web more fruitful and if you have any tips you would like to share, please email me.

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