Google Techniques You May Not Know
February 23, 2007 – 8:46 am
Google is so ubiquitous that it is listed as a verb in the dictionary. However, if you are just using it to do phrase searches, you are missing out on a lot of its power. Here are a few hints for getting the most out of your Google search engine.
If you are looking for specific information such as how high is Mount Everest, don’t enter it into Google in the form of a question. Instead use an asterisk to request the information in the form of a statement like, “Mount Everest is * feet high” (don’t include the quotes). Google will look for one word to replace the asterisk and it will return a snippet that highlights the information. You might also use this function in a statement like, “President Bush was born in *” and Google will return the year.
Another feature that might come in handy is the number range search. You simply type in a number then .. and a second number to find a something within the number range. You can use a slight modification of this technique to search for products within a certain dollar range. For instance, “dvd player $100..$300” will return sites that contain DVD players within the price range.
Another feature that a lot of people don’t know about is the movies search. Just type in the word “movies” and your zip code and Google will return a list all of the movies being shown in your area, along with the locations, number of screens, times and reviews.
You can also search for certain topics within a website using the “site:” command. For instance, you could type “site:cardinalacademy.org uniform” to return a list of any articles that mention uniforms on our website. Make sure you leave off the “www.” in the domain name so that Google searches all of the sub-domains. You can also use a “site:domain” search to limit your search to a certain type of domain. For example, “site:gov loans” will limit the return to only government sites that contain information about loans. This also works with any upper level domain like com, org, edu etc.
So grab your board (keyboard that is) and head out to do some surfing using these great new tips.