If any of these are not new to you, bravo! You’re an expert googler and someone who knows how to quickly search for information. If you’re not a search expert, then check this out.
Someone recently did a list of Google search features you might not know about (I only know of the first one listed below). Do you use any of these, and are they helpful?
- Hyphen searches. If you put a hyphen in front of a word, it excludes results with that word. The example Google gives is the phrase “jaguar speed,” followed by a hyphen and the word “car” . . . jaguar speed -car . . . meaning how fast the animal is, not the car.
- Tildes. They’re the wavy dash thing, located on the top-left of your keyboard. If you put one in front of a word, it also searches for synonyms of that word. So something like “music classes” . . . with a tilde in front of “classes” . . . music ~classes. It will also look for music “lessons” and music “coaching.”
- Searching specific sites. Start with the word “site”, then a colon, and the URL for the site you want to search. For example: site:olympics.com figure skating
- Searching for different file types. There’s a dedicated “image search” button, but you can also specifically search for things like PDFs and MP3s. Just start your search with “filetype”, followed by a colon . . . filetype:
- Asterisks. If you don’t know a word, put an asterisk in there. It’s useful if you don’t know the name of a song but know SOME of the lyrics. For example: “falling down like [asterisk] into [asterisk]” is vague. But Google knows you probably mean “like pieces into place” from the Taylor Swift song “All Too Well”.