Most used Google Search Tips and Tricks

This article was modified on 2012-05-29 08:13:50


If Google is your search engine and probably it is, one fact is for sure. You`re using the most powerful search tool ever. Most of the people will type www.google.com, go there and enter a search phrase, starting to look for pages that will took them to the desired information. I am not saying that it`s a bad thing to proceed in this way. I did the same thing for years but I`ve discovered that if you use a couple of tricks you can save a lot of time, find more, better information.

You don`t have to be an expert, you just have to remember a couple of ``shortcuts`` ( tips ) and you will never going to search again like you used to.

There isn`t a known number of search tips and if they exist, well known and used by Google engineers they won`t exist forever. It`s just a temporary thing but what I am going to show you, has already been tested and it works right now and more important, all of them are efficient and easily to remember Google search tips and tricks.

My list with Google search tips

1. Specific word or phrase

This is the tip that I use almost daily and it provides the best results when searching for something. In my opinion this one is the most powerful tip.
Example: ``United States of America````

Result: Highly relevant information regarding this country, images and everything you would like to know.

2. Specific word with exclude option

It does the same thing but you can exclude words that you don`t want to appear in your search results.
Example: ``best gas engine`` -diesel

Result: You should see results that talks about best gas engines but doesn`t contains the word ``diesel``, I was given this example due to fact that I might want to read opinions about gas engines only, excluding off-topic or endless battles gas vs diesel

3. Search a word within a website via Google

See if the website that you want contains the word you`re looking for
Example: ``Christmas`` site:www.youtube.com

Result: Popular songs during Christmas time were displayed in search results, actually that`s what I intended to do and if you would like to find more about YouTube search read this article.

4. Search for specific document type:

Let`s say that I would like to read an article regarding Volkswagen engines in .pdf ( Adobe Acrobat Reader ) format
Example: ``volkswagen engines`` .pdf

Result: You will find web pages that contains information about volkswagen engines in .pdf format only.

5. Comparing results using OR

I would like to find pages with subjects concentrated on 2 presidents.
Example: ``George Bush or Barack Obama``
Example: George Bush or Barack Obama

Result: The results will be different if we use the quotes and without them. That`s exactly what I intended to do.

6. Search for Area Code:

You can use Google to search for area codes
Example: 217
Example: Area Code 217

Result: It will work on both ways

7. Calculator

Yes, Google is smart enough to perform all kind of operations
Example: 217 * 11
Example: 217 / 11

Result: You can use a lot of calculator commands, here are the results 217 * 11 = 2 387 | 217 / 11 = 19.7272727

8. Weather forecast

If you`re impressed by the calculator, try weather for a large town
Example: Weather New York
Example: Weather in  New York

Result: It will tell you the degrees, wind, humidity and it will show you a forecast for the following days, I really like this feature

9. Searching for addresses

Let`s say that you would like to eat a pizza in your town. All you have to do is to use Google Maps and type there the word pizza and city
Example: pizza new york

Result: You will get all the addresses where you can eat a pizza and as you can see you can evean read what other people said about it.

10. More Google commands

What I did was to show you only a couple of one of the most popular search types on Google, but there are more of them. You won`t ever use most of them but if you`re interested take a look at google search operators or at Google basic search help and if you need even more info just search them on Google, you should find thousands of pages or even more on this subject.

I hope you enjoyed reading this article. I hope it will be useful and if I forgot about something important, feel free to add a comment and I will add it here.



Follow HowToAnswer