Google Search Tips

While many people use Google for it’s email service and as a search engine, many people are not using Google at its fullest.  It is a very powerful search engine and one of the best ways of accessing that power is by clicking on the Advanced Search link on the Google home page.  This allows you to narrow down your searches by allowing you to search while choosing exact phrases, languages and even file types.  You can also narrow your search down to top level domains or even search within a specific site itself.

Google automatically uses the Boolean construct to do it’s searches.  This means that if you put in more than one word in the search box Google will search for all of the words and return matches that include all words.  For instance, if you type “baseball, basketball, soccer“, Google will search, “baseball AND basketball AND soccer”.  If you want it to search for one word or another, type “baseball OR basketball OR soccer” or you can type “baseball | basketball | soccer”.  You can even run a search that will include one word “baseball” and then choose only one of another group of words. Type, “baseball (Yankees, Dodgers, Cubs). Notice the caps in AND and OR?  That is needed in Boolean connectors because they are case sensitive.

Use quotation marks when you want to search for a term. “greatest baseball player of all time” will only bring up results which includes that sequence of words together.  This is the only time that Google will search for words like ‘then’ ‘and’ or ‘if’.  Most of the time Google completely ignores these ’stop words’ which is what they are called.

Google will even let you search for words with similar meanings.  To do a synonym search type, “~baseball”.  This will bring up results with pages that include words such as “sports”, “little league” and other similar words.

If you are interested in only seeing the results by a certain type of file enter, “filetype:doc”.  Replace doc with any type of file, including pdf, txt, audio and video files.

Sometimes when researching you want to get information from people that are truly authoritative in a specific subject.  There are a lot of webpages out there and though many of these people seem to have the correct information there is a place where you can check with the experts.  Scholar.google.com has all kinds of documents from universities, professional societies and a ton of other sources.  It is a massive database so you want to be extremely specific in your search or you will get too many results to be any good for you.  This is a tool for serious researchers, not just casual surfers.

When doing an image search on Google enter “&imgtype=face” at the end of the search text to get more faces in the results rather then a flower when searching for the word rose.  Example “rose&imgtype=face”.  This is helpful anytime you are searching pictures because many times inanimate objects show up in the results.

As you can see there are a lot of ways that you can reduce your search results when using Google.  Web pages are added to the Internet everyday by the thousands.  The more you use these tools from Google, the less time you will spend finding the information you desire.