Getting the most from your Google searches
By far and away the most popular search engine in the world, Google is the first port of call for most people when they go online.
More than five billion searches are conducted every day, a figure so high it eclipses the total number of people who have access to the internet.
With that in mind, getting to grips with Google is essential, as it is likely your organisation will be using the web giant multiple times a day. To help you out, Penta has provided eight tips on improving your Google experience.
Search by website
If you know you want to find something specific from a certain website – such as a blog post about ransomware on Penta’s website, for instance – you can let Google do all the hard work. Having searched for a term in Google, click on the settings link beneath the search bar and then select advanced search.
Then in the first box on the advanced search page, type in what you’re looking for (ransomware) and then type in the website domain name (such as penta.ch) in to the ‘site or domain’ box half way down the page. There are various other options – such as language and time options – which can further narrow your search.
Hit the advanced search button at the bottom and presto, Google presents you with all the results matching your content search in the website you’ve specified. Easy.
Use quotes
If you are looking for a specific phrase or sequence of characters, then quote marks are a useful tool. Using these tells Google only to give you results exactly matching that phrase, whereas searching without quote marks will yield results which feature those words, but in any order.
Use hyphens
You can use a hyphen to exclude certain results from your search query. For example if you search Apple -iPhone, Google will return results which do not feature iPhone, instead providing you with news stories about Apple as a business, and links to the company’s other products.
Convert money and units
Google’s unit conversion tool can come in useful if you are looking for quick results on exchange rates or wondering how many feet are in a mile. Just type the query, such as 1UAE to USD etc, and it will display the results instantly.
Search nearby
If you are meeting a business contact for a coffee in an unknown town but you do not know where the nearest coffee shop is, Google can assist. Just put ‘coffee shops nearby’ and it will list the results.
The same theory works for the likes of car parks, railway stations and airports. Instead of needing to specify where you are, Google will pick up your location as you enter the search query – provided you have allowed your browser to access your location of course.
Shortcuts
There are a couple of handy shortcuts that are worth knowing about:
Typing ‘define’ followed by your search term will give you a dictionary definition of that word. Similarly, type synonym before a word and google will provide you with a list of alternative words with a similar meaning, plus a few antonyms – words with opposite meanings – too.
Google will also show you the weather of any location in the world if you type ‘weather’ followed by the location and the same trick works with the time, if you replace ‘weather’ with ‘time’.
Of course, Google has hundreds of other tricks up its sleeves too. Searching for companies by their stocks code will instantly bring up their stock value and a graph displaying how it has changed over the working day. Similarly Google will happily tell you when any package you have ordered will be delivered. Just paste your delivery reference code straight into Google and it will find your delivery, and tell you where it is.
The big G
Search like a pro
Google’s advanced search offers precision searching
Google
A global tool
The stats which back up Google’s strength
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