5 Tips Google Search Engine Tips To Help You Find Information
The most common way most people use Google to find information is; Enter a few words and click the “Search” button. However, as I’m sure you know, you usually have to scroll through thousands of pages, sometimes millions, so it’s often very difficult to find what you’re looking for.
Here are 5 useful tips to help you find things faster when using the Google search engine:
1. Use the Exact Phrase search option.
When you do a simple search, Google returns results for all web pages that contain the words you typed.
For example, you might want to find information about a car that you are planning to buy. You can enter: used Mercedes
Google returns a web page that contains the keywords “used” and “Mercedes” anywhere on the page. You may come across a web page that has a story with the word “used” at the top of the page and the word “Mercedes” at the bottom of the story. The exact term “used Mercedes” is unlikely to be mentioned anywhere on this page.
So, to narrow it down, put the sentence in quotes:
“Second-hand Mercedes”
Google now only shows results for websites that contain the exact term “used Mercedes”.
2. Be more specific in your search
To further narrow your search, try expanding your original keyword by adding more specific words and phrases. If you are looking for a specific car model, try adding it to your search as follows:
“used Mercedes C280”
This saves many pages of information on used Mercedes cars, but not necessarily on the desired C280 model.
3. Remove words from search results
If you search for “used Mercedes C280” you may find many web pages in the search results for websites selling Mercedes car parts. You can search dozens of car parts websites just to find one that sells cars.
Here’s what you can do…
For each search you perform, you can remove pages from the search results if they contain specific keywords that you specify. All you have to do is paste the word into the search box and put the minus sign right in front of it.
“used Mercedes C280” section
Make sure there are no spaces between the minus sign and the word you want to remove from the search results. If you put a space between them, it won’t work.
4. Use the ‘OR’ command to broaden your search
Sometimes a web page contains the information you want, but it may not contain the exact phrase you typed. Using our Mercedes example, some people might just refer to it as “C280” without using the word Mercedes.
You can use Google’s “OR” command to find web pages that contain at least one word of your choice.
Mercedes OR C280
The above search will return any webpage that contains only the word “Mercedes” or the word “c280” or both on the same page. For this to work, you must type “OR” in upper case. This tells Google that you want to use the advanced search options. If it’s lowercase, Google just treats it like any other word.
5. Try searching for synonyms
Many phrases often have alternative words that can be used to describe the same thing. Sometimes it’s difficult to know which word gets the best results. In other cases, you may not be aware of an alternative word, or you may not be able to think of it right now.
For example, instead of using the term “used,” you could type “used.” One trick you can use is to tell Google to look for synonyms for the word you specify, in addition to the main keyword. To do this, type the tilde ‘~’ right before the word, like this:
~used
In this case, Google returns results that contain the words “used” and “used”. This can be a useful trick when you can’t think of the right word to type. You can perform synonym searches for multiple words at the same time. Just add a direct tilde ‘~’ before each word, like this:
~ used ~ car
As well as “Used”, “Used” and “Auto”; this search now also returns pages containing “car” and “motorcycle” as they are synonyms of the word “car”.
I hope you find this useful, Happy searching!