Google Search Tricks and Hacks
Posted by admin | Filed under Code
Google - How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
There are many reasons to LOVE Google - mainly for the services it provides. I do not know what I would do without it. Like an addiction, I spend countless hours on Google searching, exploring and further educating myself.
As most of you might already know, there are tons of great ways that Google allows us to target and narrow our search in order to find what we are looking for much faster. In other words - making our search queries efficient. After all, time is money! If not money, then a precious resource that is continually exhausted. If looked upon as a resource, it becomes incredibly valuable, as time cannot be bought, grown, manufactured or turned back. Thanks Google for making every minute worthwhile!
With time being very valuable, I looked for ways to speed up my searching and found several really handy dandy hacks and tips for Google. Most of these are quite common and used daily by Google lovers. However, for those that might not be familiar with this feature of Google, I would love to share a few of the basic search hacks I use on a daily basis.
“Drowning in information and starving for knowledge.”
One may find a simple Google search to be quite overwhelming. When looking for something specific it is really time consuming filtering through all the information, aka - search results. The most common way to narrow our search is through the use of quotation marks (”"). When put around a phrase, quotation marks restrict the search to include all of the words in the phrase and thus giving us more precise results.
Example:
“phrase goes here”
In times where I am looking for a specific file such as a PDF, DOC, PPT or any other type, I do a simple search using filetype: just before or after the name of the file.
Example:
filetype:pdf einstein
einstein filetype:doc
Below is another nifty trick I use daily to search specific sites for information. Just a simple site:domain limits the results to just that particular site. This can also be used to just search a particular domain, such as .gov sites for forms or .edu sites for information, DOC or PDF files for research. This can be combined with the filetype: tip above to further narrow your search results.
Example:
site:digg.com leonardo da vinci
site:edu filetype:pdf leonardo da vinci
Combining several of these and other hacks/tips you can really limit and pin-point your search dramatically. PCMag had a great video explaining an intitle technique. There are many other more advanced techniques and different combinations, so please do experiment and find ones that work for you.
As for the intitle technique discussed - it consists of using the intitle: hack, which as you can tell by the name, searches the titles of pages to match your criteria. The index.of allows us to search just the index/directory of the websites, which is really efficient. The dot (.) between the index and of represents any character such as comma, colon, a space, etc. It is sort of like a wild card taking on the shape and characteristics of that text character. The type of file is what follows afterward inside of quotation marks. To separate different file types, you can use a vertical bar (|). The next set of quotation marks in this example is the title of the file. In the example below, I used the dot (.) to take the place of a space between the words. It is not necessary, but I like to use it. After that, you list the page extensions you would like to search, such as htm, html, php, etc.
Example:
intitle:index.of + “mp3″ + “the.way.we.were” -htm -html -php
intitle:”index.of” + “mp3|aif” + “the.way.we.were” -htm -html
“The next best thing to knowing something is knowing where to find it.”
Of course there’s tons of other hacks that are just as helpful and I really encourage you to try them all. Take a look through the Advanced Search Operators of Google Help Center to find other shortcuts that work for you. I recommend flipping though O’Reilly’s Google Hacks
Hope you’ve enjoyed this post and possibly even found it helpful. Happy searching!
∂ meow
Tags: google hacks
