by Kris Traughber
If you use Google to do most of your searches on the internet, then you know it can find almost anything. But, you may not know that there are ways to make your Google search even more powerful.
Try the following tips to take your searches to the next level:
- Exact phrase – To find an exact phrase, enclose it in double quotes. For example, simply typing the words los angeles tours would find everything containing those words, but not necessarily together. But, if you were looking for a specific company called Los Angeles Tours, then you could type “los angeles tours”. If you type hollywood and “los angeles tours” then you get results with the terms hollywood and los angeles tours but not necessarily together.
- Restrict a word or phrase – If you put a dash (-) in front of a word or phrase, it will omit that word from the results. This is useful if you get a lot of results returning something you don’t want. Maybe you searched for los angeles tours and you get a lot of results about Hollywood, but you’re not interested in Hollywood. Simply add hollywood to your search with a dash in front like so, los angeles tours -hollywood. The same goes for exact phrases. los angeles tours -“hollywood walk of fame”.
- Unit converter – If you type something like 1 cup to liters, Google will give you the conversion.
- Calculator – Using the math operators on your keyboard, you can type simple mathematical equations. For example, typing 22* will return 4.
- Website specific – A lot of websites these days (especially blogs) give you the ability to search within their website. But, some of these sites don’t have user-friendly site search. For example, one of my favorite sites Lifehacker doesn’t have a very easy-to-use search in my opinion. So, whenever I want to look for articles on their site, I simply type the following in Google: site:lifehacker.com. Just use the site: operator followed by the domain name of the site you want to search and your good to go. It is as good as and often better than the search provided on the site itself.
- Flights – Simply type two city names with the word to between them and Google will return flight results. los angeles to nashville.
- Movie Times – Type the movie: operator followed by a zip code and Google will return movie theaters and show times. movie:90278
- Restrict the date range – Although this one isn’t a keyword that you type into the search box, this is a feature that I probably use more than any other. On the left side of the search results screen, there is a link that says Show Search Tools. This gives you many options, one of which is the ability to restrict your results by date range. This is very useful when you’re looking for the latest information about a given topic.
Many of us have special websites we go to for certain information like flights, movies, definitions, conversions, etc. But, as you can see, you get a lot of information simply by knowing what to type in Google’s search box.