More Google Techniques
February 28, 2007 – 6:52 amHere are a few more basic Google tricks to help you get the most out of your web searches. If you are doing a search and you want to match just Cardinal Academy use quotes as in “Cardinal Academy”. If you don’t want to use double quotes, you can use a dash to form a phrase match like Cardinal-Academy.
If you want to match Cardinal Academy but you don’t want to match training, use “Cardinal Academy” -training. In other words, you can use the minus sign to exclude terms.
Google is really pretty smart, particularly when it comes to spelling and synonyms. For instance, if you type in “oper labs” it will ask you if you meant “opera labs”. However, if you actually wanted to search for “oper labs”, just can just add a plus sign, like this “+oper labs”, to tell Google not to look for alternative spellings or synonyms.
You can type practically anything in the box and Google will try to return a valid result. Try typing in a UPS or FedEx tracking number, a flight number or something like “time in Zurich” and Google will return the result you would expect.
Google also has a great built in calculator. You can do pretty sophisticated calculations like logarithms. For instance, if you type in “log 5.0 x 106”, Google will return “log (5.0) x 106 = 74.0908205.” You can also do currency conversions by typing something like 5 dollars in yen. Google will return “five U.S. dollars = 605.15 Japanese yen.”
You can find definitions of words by typing in “define: [enter word].” In fact, if you type in any word, and look in the upper right corner of the window, you will see a “definition” hyperlink that you can click to get the definition.
This next tip is for lazy people (of course that doesn’t apply to anyone you know, right?). Suppose you need to develop PowerPoint presentation on crime prevention and you would like to have a presentation to start with. You can type “crime prevention filetype:ppt” and Google will return just PowerPoint files on crime prevention. This trick will work with most file types like .doc or .xml (don’t get excited, it doesn’t work for mp3 files).
Happy surfing!