Simplifide Searching
Google gets simplicity. Hold your mouse still while on their homepage, and everything but the essentials fade away. Their simple mission statement: to organizing the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. It’s no wonder that in the 11 years since they started in a friends garage, Google has come to dominate the world in searching… so much so that “google” was added as a verb to the Oxford English Dictionary last year.
The main reason Google has done so well is they have made searching for information simple and easy for the average person. And yet, their search so powerful that with the right tools you can find exactly what you want . Here are some of the tools that you can use to find what you’re looking for….
The Basics
Google search works on Boolean logic, named after George Boole, the man who first developed the system in the mid 1850s! (Just goes to show you, we can learn from the old folks!) Boolean searching uses operators to tell the search engine what results to bring up. So here are some of the operators that are useful to simplify your searching…
By default, Google automatically adds the operator “AND” between every word in your search. For example, if you search for [ alternative fuel cars ], you will get results for any web page that has the words alternative AND the word fuel AND the word cars. So if that’s what you want, you don’t have to do anything, because this is the default search.
FYI: I’ve put all of the searches in brackets so that it doesn’t get confusing. Don’t actually include the brackets in your searches! :-)
If you are searching for either one of two words, you can search for them using the operator OR. So you could search for [ hybrid OR electric cars ]
If there is a word that you don’t want to be include in your search terms, you can use the operator NOT, or the “-” sign. For instance, you could search [ electric OR hydrogen cars NOT hybrid ] or you could search [ electric OR hydrogen cars -hybrid ] – both will return the same results. Notice that there isn’t any space between the hyphen and the word – this is important. [ - electric ] is not the same as [ -electric ]
Google automatically searches for synonyms of the words you type. So if you search for “fuel”, it might list results for fuel, gasoline, diesel, etc. If you want to narrow your results to just the one word, add a + sign before the word [ +fuel ]
As mentioned above, Google’s default is to add AND between every word. So if you search for [ biodeisel fuel ], the results will be any page that contains both words. If you want narrow the search down to search to those words together in a page as a phrase (i.e. biodiesel fuel), then add quotation marks on either side of your phrase [ "biodiesel fuel" ]
If you are looking for something but you don’t know one of the words, you can use a * to signify a wild card, or “fill in the blank”. So if you wanted to know which president Martin Van Buren was ), you could type, [ Martin Van Buren was the * president of the United States ] (He was also my great great great great great great great grandpa!)
Ever just know that you saw something on a site, but can’t find it later? You can use the operator site: to search only on a specific site. [ site:simplifi.de relationships] This can also be very useful if you want to NOT look at a certain site, if combined with a - [ George Washington -site:wikipedia.org ].
One of the downsides of traveling internationally is having to convert currency all the time. If you have access to Google, though, you can quickly find out what the going exchange rate is. You don’t even have to go Boolean for this one – just type something like [ 100 dollars in euros ] and it will convert it for you automatically. Also extremely handy if you’re buying something online in another currency.
More Geeky…
These are searches that are extremely useful for specific purposes, but are a bit more on the geeky side of Google searching… if you feel comfortable with them, have at it!
Intitle: This will search in the title of webpages [ intitle:"alternative fuel" ]
Intext: This searches only the body text of web pages. [ intext:"alternative fuels" ]
filetype: If you are looking for a specific filetype, you could search like [ alternative fuels filetype:pdf ] Also remember that you can use this to exclude a certain filetype [ hybrid car comparison -filetype:pdf ]
Twitter specific: To search Twitter bios, you can search something like [ site:twitter.com bio:alternative fuels ]. The same is also true for searching Twitter locations: [ site:twitter.com location:chicago ]
So that’s all the useful tips that we have for Google searching right now. Just be aware that you can combine any or all of these into your searches. Creatively mix and match operators, and you will find what you’re looking for much faster!
Now what are we missing? Got any hot tips for Google searching? Please enlightened us and everyone else in the comments! And, if this helped you at all, please like it on Facebook or retweet on Twitter – that’s how more people get to know us. Thanks!
