The average Internet user spends 2 hours per month searching sites like Google. Why Google? Because the average Google index is 3 times that of Yahoo or MSN.
Think you know how to search on Google? Nice and easy right? Just type and search.
Google has many tools to help you find what you’re looking for. In this article, I will discuss some of the basic and advanced features of the online giant. You may be surprised to learn something new that will make your search easier.
Sidebar In May 2010, Google released several new features to make life easier. So let’s look at them first. Once you have done your search and all the results are displayed, the tools are now on the sidebar (on the left). First, you’ll notice that you can filter your data by data type. You can search for a photo, so see the “Images” section. You can see what ordinary people are talking about, so check out “Blogs” or “Conversations.”
Keep in mind that you can always go back to “All” to remove used searches.
- Let’s take a look at each filter on the list:
- All: without full survey data.
- Images: illustrations only
- Video: Video only
- News: News from around the world
- Books: The Google Books website, books.google.com, tells you where to buy or rent books (library) .
- Maps: Search Google Maps (I use Google Maps almost every day)
- Shopping: Comparing Google prices
- Blog: Accepts content found from blogs only
- Update: Twitter results and micro blogging and other social media
- Discussions: Most of the results are in the forums
You can further customize by specifying the term you want to use, you can only search for the last 24 hours, last days, last week, and other results. These options actually increase Google’s ability to find what you’re looking for faster and easier.
An experienced veteran
Here are some old waiting habits you may or may not be aware of:
Think before you search – this may seem obvious, but a clear understanding of what you are looking for will give you the best results. Think of words that best describe what you are researching. Ask yourself:
are there any alternatives? If this is a descriptive search
Search – Google will automatically put an “AND” in all your search terms. For example, when I search for [swim], Google searches results for “AND” swim and both terms on those pages. You can learn more about swimming “OR” walking. In this case, searching for swim OR walk will return results, usually swim or walk. If you use OR, be sure to use upper case, otherwise Google will ignore it.
Remove terms from your search – sometimes you may search for vague terms. For example, if I’m searching for information about a software “flash” but I don’t want to return results that include the word “camera”, my search would look like this: flash -camera here. The minus sign should always be preceded by a space and no space after it) You can now exclude words from your searches for whatever reason.
Search for synonyms – Google allows you to search
for synonyms using the ~ tool. For example, if I wanted to search for comedy movies, but I wanted similar terms to appear in my search, my search would look something like this: [movies ~ comedy]. Results can include “pagalworld mp3
“humorous,” “stand-up,” and other synonyms for the root word “funny.”
Find the password exactly – sometimes you just want to know exactly where the password appears on all those websites. To do this, enclose the desired term in quotation marks