Googling Google the simple way!
My household consists of a curious mixture of knowledge and misinformation. The ingredient which expands that factor is the knowledge, or more to the point the lack of it, when dealing with searches.
I usually duck when I hear mutterings coming from a computer location but a frustrated wail just had to be acknowledged especially when that wail included the statement; “I hate Google”. Those are pretty strong words. I just had to find out what prompted such a dire statement.
Now I don’t know who taught you dear reader to search using the various search engines but the simplest rule of all is to speak to them in plain language just as you would to another person. That usually produces an acceptable range of answers to your search. The conundrum however is that the more words you use the harder it becomes for the search engine to find what you really want to know.
The simple solution is to précis the question using simple logic. The best way to demonstrate some of these techniques is to quote examples.
Searching for the meaning of a word is simple and is pretty self-explanatory! Just type “define garrulous” or whatever word you’re curious about. The definition will come up first, along with the word’s synonyms and antonyms. Click the arrow below the definition card to learn its origin, translate it, or see its pattern of use over time.
Easy!
If you want to look up basic facts about people and places just type their names. Google can usually tell you the birth and death dates of famous people and all the basic facts about a location and its inhabitants. To search for your own IP address just type “ip address” into the search bar, and your public address will appear. Dogs are constantly in the news these days. To learn about dog breeds just type in the breed name followed by the word temperament and you will get the full low down on your favourite pooch.
But there are more precise shortcuts to searching. To see if your webmaster has done all that he should have type in “site:yourdomain.com.au” and all the pages indexed by Google will appear.
To discover all the sites that link to yours just enter “link:yourdomain.com.au”.
Other similar options are getting information about a URL, including the cached version of the page, similar pages, and pages that link to the site. The code is “info: yourdomain.com.au”. Or see what a page looked like the last time Google crawled your site would need “cache:yourdomain.com.au” or whichever site you may be interested in.
Obviously I mean for you to use your own domain name in the above examples but a little care is required. Make sure there are no spaces either side of the colon sign and leave out the quotation marks. An interesting thing to try is to find similar sites. Perhaps even using your own domain name. Run a test on your competitors if you already know their URL. If you search for related sites to the Time.com, you’ll find other news publication sites you may be interested in.
For example if you type “related:time.com” you will have a list of sites that are a close match to the Time Warner site.
If you are searching for a product you can also include a price range such as “microwave $200..$600”. Just make sure there are only two period marks between the amounts. The term “daterange:” produces similarly sorted results. For example “switzerland datrange:201408 – 201410” will search information for the period August to November in the year 2014.
You can also search within a site or domain. For example, you can find all mentions of “olympics” on the NBC website, or any .gov websites. Just type “olympics site:nbc.com” or olympics site:.gov and so on.
If you want to search for pages that may have just one of several words, include a capitalised OR between the words. Without the OR, your results would typically show only pages that match both terms. Example: “world cup location 2014 OR 2018”.
To exclude a word uses a minus or dash sign. Add a dash (-) before a word or site to exclude all results that include that word. This is especially useful for words with multiple meanings, like Jaguar the car brand and jaguar the animal. The example here is “jaguar speed -car” which returns the speed of the animal.
Using “allintitle: ” will produce pages that include the word following the colon in this search, whilst “inurl:” will return all the sites that include your search word.
Just as obvious now that we are getting the hang of this coding “allintext:” will return all pages containing your search terms. Example “allintext:south pole” will return all pages with south pole in their content.
Mathematics is a cinch since entering numbers followed by the arithmetic symbol and the operator will produce the answer for that sum. Pretty similar to the way you use a spreadsheet.
Searching for a particular file type is also simple. Just enter “filetype:” followed by the type of file you are looking for. An example would be “bananas filetype:ppt” would return all PowerPoint files dealing with the keyword bananas.
Operators such as “movie:”, “stocks:” and “weather:” followed by the chosen key word will return the obvious answers. Like the meerkat said: “Simple!”
The last one I will mention is a term most parents would be interested in. Safe search is designed to execute searches but omit unacceptable terms or sites. The usage is straight forward; “safesearch: breast cancer” will only return factual sites relating to breast cancer and automatically block adult content.
There are quite a few other shortcut methods but those I will let you explore yourself. Just search for these using the techniques described here and you will be well on your way to becoming expert in using search engines to obtain the results you may really be looking for. In my case I have left a copy of this brief guide on a certain desk in the hope of easing the frustrations produced in our technology driven lives and relieving the stress my household imposes on me from time to time.
