Top 10 Google Search Tips
In today’s day and age, most everyone “googles” religiously and wouldn’t think of using any other search engine. Those that do usually would then use Yahoo! and even then each to his own as if you like to read the trash on Yahoo!s homepage instead of just Googling what you want. In recent years, Google has become a verb and a household name. Google is the tech buzz word and heck, even fun to say. I really like Google Earth, too.
There is an infinite amount of information on the Web and Google’s goal is to organize it all. If you only use it to search for documents or files, you may be surprised at what else it can do. Here’s our Top 10 Google Search Tips:
10• Exclude words. If you search for Law Technology News’s editor, Monica Bay, by typing her name, you will pull up many results for California’s Santa Monica Bay. But if you exclude “Santa,” (type “-Santa”), you lose the irrelevant geographic results. This tip came from the aforementioned Robert Affleck. If he searches his name, he always has to exclude the word “Ben” to narrow down the results.
9• Movies. To find where a movie is playing, just type “movie:” followed by the name of the movie and your ZIP code. Here’s how this might look — “movie: secret life of bees 98101.”
8• Quotation marks. Use quotation marks around searched terms to find matches that have both of these words and not matches that contain one or both of the words. For example, “Seattle Mariners” will likely pull up baseball news, rather than city or sailing hits.
7• Wild Cards. Use the asterisk character * as a wild card. Here’s how: Type “Learn * Every Day” and search. You’ll find “Learn Something New Every Day” on the results page. This is really handy for finding quotes or lyrics to songs.
6• Searching a specific site. If you want to exclusively search one URL, use the “site:” function. For example: type “site:cnn.com law firm.” This returns results where the words “law firm” appear within the CNN (and only www.cnn.com) Web site.
5• Stock symbols. Type a stock symbol and Google returns the most up-to-date stock price that it has indexed. Try it: type “SBUX” and click Search to return the stock price for Starbucks stock.
4• Definitions. Forget the dictionary, just let Google do the work. Type “define:” then the word to look up. To search for the definition of Googol, type “define:Googol.”
3• Music. If you search the Web for Britney Spears, you get at least 53,700,000 returned results and links. However, type “music:Britney Spears,” and the results narrow to display only those links related to music — in this case, only 51!
2• Convert anything. Whether dollars to Euros, or liters to pints, you can quickly obtain conversion information. For example: measurements: (1 liter=2.1 U.S. pints), temperature: (73º Fahrenheit=22.7º Celsius), currency: (230 Euros=292.7 U.S. dollars), distance: (200 meters=656.1 feet). No need to bookmark conversion Web sites as creating conversions in Google is more convenient.
Drumroll please……..
1• Calculator. No need to open a Microsoft Corp. Excel workbook or Word document (Ctrl+F9 then type = followed by the formula and then press F9) to quickly calculate values. Instead, inside the Google search box, just type something like “12+12″ and press Enter (or click Search) and the result displays just under the “Search” box.
You can also type more complex formulas, such as “12*23/134″ (12 multiplied by 23 and divided by 134). Use the +, -, *, / symbols and parentheses to perform simple calculations. We just love this feature along with currency conversion because things in life today just never add up… well now they do!
Now get Googling!
