Introduction
Most people use Google search each day for various reasons resulting in a whopping 8.5 billion searches daily. Many don’t use it to its full potential, so coming up I’ll show you some cool tips and tricks that you should be using with Google search that will help you to be more efficient and get better, more relevant search results. Let’s get started!
1. Search by File Type
Sometimes searching by file type can be very useful, especially for students, teachers, or anyone conducting research that may be looking for a PDF, Word document, or any other file type. Here’s how it works:
First, put in your search term followed by a space, then type filetype:PDF. Now you’ll see that most of the results are PDF links. I’ll switch out the ending here and put in Doc. Now you’ll see I ended up with different results with the links to doc files. The file type search works great with just about any file type extension.
2. Use Search Operators
Using search operators such as the plus or minus sign is a great way to get better search results. I’ll show you an example. Doing a generic search for Tom Cruz, as you can see, the search results are quite varied. Let’s go back to the top.
Let’s suppose I just wanted results related to Tom Cruz and Scientology and nothing else. After typing in Tom Cruz, add a space, then the plus sign right before Scientology, and you’ll see the results are all related to Tom Cruz and Scientology. If I wanted to omit any search results about Scientology, right before the word Scientology, instead of the plus, I would use a minus sign. Let’s go down further to the results, and you’ll see results regarding Scientology have been omitted. I personally use search operators every day, and it does make searching on Google a lot more efficient.
3. Search with Quoted Phrases
Some of you may know that using words or phrases in quotes will only give you results that match the words in order inside the quotes. For example, if I type inside of quotes “May the force be with you,” it’ll give you results that only contain that phrase. Let’s go back to the top.
Using an asterisk replacing a word will give you variations on that phrase in the results. So replacing the word force with an asterisk gives you various results. For example, “May the * be with you.” Let’s scroll on down here. May the fourth be with you, may the forest be with you, may the Lord be with you, may the farce be with you, and so on and so forth. Using an asterisk is especially great for trying to find all forms of similar phrases or can be useful in finding unknown words and phrases.
4. Find Nearby Places
Using the word nearby or the words near me at the end of a search will show you the results of places closest to you. For example, if I was in the mood for some really good Greek food, I would do a search for “Greek food nearby” or “Greek food near me.” Using the words nearby or the words near me also works great for searching for restaurants or any other type of business.
5. View Cached Pages
There may be times when a website won’t load due to server problems or other issues, but you still want to view a web page. After doing a search, select the menu icon to the right of the URL in the popup window on the right, click the drop-down arrow, then select cached. This will take you to a static view of the last time Google took a snapshot of that page. You’ll see the date and time here at the top. I’ve also used the cached option in the past to view articles that are sometimes hidden behind paywalls, but this method is hit or miss.
6. Search Within a Specific Website
Doing a search within a specific website is one of the more useful search tricks. Let’s say I want to find out what CNET has written about the Apple Vision Pro. In the search box, I would type “Apple Vision Pro” followed by site:cnet.com. These search results will only include pages from that site regarding the search term.
If you wanted to do a broader search but narrowed down to just educational websites, just put edu at the end of your search, which I’ll do right now. Now the results for the Vision Pro are just from educational websites.
7. Use Custom Date Range
Searching using a custom date range is a great way for limiting the time frame for search results. After doing your search, select tools here on the right, select the drop-down next to anytime, and here you have several options in the drop-down, including past hour and many others. I prefer the custom range. You could use the calendar to input your dates, but that can take a long time if you’re going back several years, so I usually input the dates manually in a month date year format. So let me enter those in. When you’re done with that, click on go. Now the search results are narrowed to specific dates within that range.
8. Check Stock Market Performance
This is a quick one for those of you that play the stock market. To see how a particular stock is doing at one time, just enter the stock symbol for a company, also known as the ticker symbol. Now you have to enter the name of the company followed by stock. Let’s check Apple. You get this handy chart showing today’s results for that stock. This can be set from one day all the way up to Max going back to when they were first publicly traded on the stock market. Now let’s check Microsoft. It looks like they’ve had a pretty good run as of late.
9. Search Titles of Web Pages
Sometimes to get more relevant search results, it’s best to just search the words in the titles of web pages. Here’s how you do it: type allintitle: add a space followed by the keywords that you want to search. This will only return results with all the keywords in the title. This also works to search for keywords in the URLs of web pages, so instead of title, replace that with URL.
10. Use Advanced Search
If you really want to narrow down your search results and have more control, advanced search may be where you want to go. In the lower right corner, head over to settings and select advanced search. Here you’ll have more than a dozen options for filtering your search. Just be careful when filtering. If you narrow down the results too much, you could end up with very few or no results. After you’ve typed and selected the parameters that you want, click advanced search.
