Bill Reynolds — July 25, 2017 — July 25, 2017
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We typically only search one way in Google, but there are more ways to search. In fact, Google has many built in search tricks that can save you time and effort. Here are a few of our favorites.
Search within a specific site
If you want to see how you appear on the search engine, or search within a site, type this in the search (site:mysite.com). If you preface with a keyword it runs a query within that site for any pages or posts that uses that keyword. To use keyword search you would type something like this keyword site:mysite.com.
A suggested use may be to find where you read that one thing in that site you bookmarked. A good example is to try this in the search bar on NYTimes.com
Search “op-ed site:nytimes.com” to try it.
Don’t worry about spelling and punctuation
The one thing that web developers are known for is bad spelling. Please give some grace to us. If you wrote code all day rather than actual words your spelling may go down hill as well. Thank goodness developers at Google recognized that users sometimes aren’t that great either. What words do you hate trying to spell? Mine is restaurant. Or is it restaurant…
Cases don’t matter either, Google knows pronouns, nouns, verbs, and names. It’s come a long way from just scanning a websites HTML and returning results. Another thing is punctuation. Search ignores that. Best restaurant new york?, is treated like, Best restaurant New York.
Search by file type
Searching within a site isn’t limited to just articles. You can also search for files. Sites have more content than that of pages, there’s power points, PDF’s, and more. the file type identifier is your solution. So try this.
affordable health care act filetype:ppt
Include and/or ignore words
Using the +(plus) and -(minus) in front of search terms tells Google that you definitely do or do not want the word included in search results. For example, if you type salsa recipe -tomatoes you’ll run a search in Google that looks for salsa recipes, but not ones that also have tomatoes.
Search in a range
Shopping on sites are growing at an incredible rate. So it makes sense that Google would help out the consumer. To limit results to a price range you simply separate your minimum and maximum prices with ..(2 dots). If you type “Sony TV $ 300..$ 500” you’ll see a search result of where you can buy the product, but only in the price range you search.
Get the time
Have you ever wonder what time it is in another zone or country. Well type in search “time Japan” for example and you’ll know when you should call before coffee and doughnuts.
Track your packages
Simply enter your package # like this: 1Z9999W99999999999 in search. Then you now know where you new iPhone cover is. And you didn’t have to figure out that confusing shipping site. You know we’ve all been there.
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