Your Google Search on Steroids

It’s estimated that Google processes over 3.8 million searches per minute worldwide. That’s 5.6 billion searches per day. Now with millions of websites, blogs, and videos on-line, are you finding what you’re looking for? Hopefully this blog post will help put a finer point on your searches and will help you use Google more efficiently.

So let’s put your searches on steroids!

Phrase Search

Because of the volumes and volumes of data in Googles database, single word searches may not give you the best results.  By putting double quotes around a set of words, you are telling Google to consider the exact words in that exact order without any change. Google already uses the order and the fact that the words are together as a very strong signal and will stray from it only for a good reason, so quotes are usually unnecessary. By insisting on phrase search you might be missing good results accidentally. For example, a search for [ “Alexander Bell” ] (with quotes) will miss the pages that refer to Alexander G. Bell.

Search within a specific website

Google allows you to specify that your search results must come from a given website. For example, the query [ iraq site:nytimes.com ] will return pages about Iraq but only from nytimes.com. The simpler queries [ iraq nytimes.com ] or [ iraq New York Times ] will usually be just as good, though they might return results from other sites that mention the New York Times. You can also specify a whole class of sites, for example [ iraq site:.gov ] will return results only from a .gov domain and [ iraq site:.iq ] will return results only from Iraqi sites.

This is also useful to check for all of the references to your corporate website in Google catalogue. Simply enter [site: yourdomain.com]

File Type

Sometimes, you may be looking for a specific file type. Google can do this very effective if you construct your search properly.  So, when I was looking for the manual for my Roland Juno Di synthesizer,  if I type “Roland Juno Di” into Google, it returns reviews, stores that sell it, etc.  But when I enter in “Roland Juno Di” filetype:PDF, not only did I get the manual in PDF format, but I also many other useful documents like the patch list, all in PDF format. This also works for JPGs, MP3s, DOCs etc.

Terms you want to exclude

In the English language, many words have multiple meanings. So the ability to remove a subject from a search may be very helpful . Attaching a minus sign immediately before a word indicates that you do not want pages that contain this word to appear in your results. The minus sign should appear immediately before the word and should be preceded with a space. For example, in the query [ anti-virus software ], the minus sign is used as a hyphen and will not be interpreted as an exclusion symbol; whereas the query [ anti-virus -software ] will search for the words ‘anti-virus’ but exclude references to software. You can exclude as many words as you want by using the – sign in front of all of them, for example [ jaguar -cars -football -os ]. The – sign can be used to exclude more than just words. For example, place a hyphen before the ‘site:’ operator (without a space) to exclude a specific site from your search results.

Fill in the blanks

The *, or wildcard, is a little-known feature that can be very powerful. If you include * within a query, it tells Google to try to treat the star as a placeholder for any unknown term(s) and then find the best matches. For example, the search [ Google * ] will give you results about many of Google’s products (go to next page and next page —  there are many products). The query [ Obama voted * on the * bill ] will give you stories about different votes on different bills. Note that the * operator works only on whole words, not parts of words.

The OR operator

Google’s default behavior is to consider all the words in a search. If you want to specifically allow either one of several words, you can use the OR operator (note that you have to type ‘OR’ in ALL CAPS). For example, [ San Francisco Giants 2004 OR 2005 ] will give you results about either one of these years, whereas [ San Francisco Giants 2004 2005 ] (without the OR) will show pages that include both years on the same page. The symbol | can be substituted for OR. (The AND operator, by the way, is the default, so it is not needed.)

Enable the SafeSearch filter

Social media is now the #1 activity on the Internet. But until very recently it was porn. That said, sometimes, the most innocent searches like “breast” will give you 50/50 clean & questionable results.  Well, Google has a SafeSearch filter. To use it, you must have a Google account.

Enable the SafeSearch filter

1.Visit the Google Preferences page.

2.In the SafeSearch Filtering section, choose the SafeSearch level you’d like to use:

  • Strict filtering filters sexually explicit video and images from Google Search result pages, as well as results that might link to explicit content.
  • Moderate filtering excludes sexually explicit video and images from Google Search result pages, but does not filter results that might link to explicit content. This is the default SafeSearch
  • No filtering, as you’ve probably figured out, turns off SafeSearch filtering completely.

3.Click Save Preferences at the bottom of the page when you’re done setting your preferences.

Google does its best to keep SafeSearch as up-to-date and comprehensive as possible, but objectionable content sometimes slips through the cracks.

Google Search is the Swiss Army Knife of Apps

If you’re like most people with a smart phone, you have an app for weather, unit conversion,  location based apps, dictionary, stock quotes, calculator, and on and on. For almost anything you can think of… “there’s an app for that”. Well if you wanted to, you could trash them all and just use Google search.

Weather

To see the weather for many US and worldwide cities, type “weather” followed by the name of the city, postal code or zipcode. You can also type “weather” and see the weather of your current location.

Unit Conversion

You can use Google to convert between many different units of measurement of height, weight, and volume among many others. Just enter your desired conversion into the search box and Google will do the rest.

Flight Tracker

To see flight status for arriving and departing Canadian and U.S. flights, type in the name of the airline and the flight number into the search box.

i.e. AC 230

Local Businesses

If you’re looking for a shop, restaurant, or other local business you can search for the category of business and the location and we’ll return the results along with a map, reviews, and contact information.

Dictionary

To see a definition for a word or phrase, simply type the word “define” followed by the word(s) you want defined.

Time

To see the time in many cities around the world, type in “time” and the name of the city.

Stock Quotes

To see current market data for a given company or fund, type the ticker symbol into the search box. On the results page, you can click the link to see more data from Google Finance.

GOOG

Calculator

To use Google’s built-in calculator function, simply enter the calculation you’d like done into the search box.

16/20=

Earthquakes

For recent earthquake activity around the world simply type “earthquake” in the search box.

Currency Conversion

To use our built-in currency converter, simply enter the conversion you’d like done into the Google search box and we’ll provide your answer directly on the results page.

10 USD in GBP

Fill in the Blank

Sometimes the best way to ask a question is to get Google to fill in the blank by adding an asterisk (*) at the part of the sentence or question that you want finished into the Google search box.

Stevie Ray Vaughan died in *

Package Tracking

You can track packages by typing the tracking number for your UPS, Fedex or USPS package directly into the search box. We’ll return results that include quick links to easily track the status of your shipment.

Don’t Stop Here

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