How to Google (web searching tips & tricks)
Have you ever thought that you can improve your web searching skills like any other skill? How? Let’s find out!
Introduction
Nowadays, anyone who’s looking for information will probably start with a search engine, often Google search. Although it has several smaller rivals, and is blocked or banned in some countries, Google is dominant among search engines. Google currently processes about 40,000 search requests a second, which amounts to over 1,200,000,000,000 a year . Given that the population of the world is about 8 billion at the time, you can calculate that the average per person is about 160 searches per year. And of course taking into consideration that many people don’t have any access to the internet this number grows much bigger.
So, web searching is an important part of our everyday lives, both in personal and professional ways. In this article you’ll discover ways to make your Google searches (keep in mind that some of the same ideas may work with other search engines too) more efficient.
The familiar way to use Google is just to enter one or more words (query terms) and submit the search. However, just entering a simple keyword can often generate a very large number of results, many of which are not relevant to your current needs. That is why Google provides a whole series of operators which let you fine-tune your search.
Exact phrase
Try searching on: world’s best song
You will get some hits containing this phrase but also others to do with the most viewed or most awarded song in the world.
Now try searching: “world’s best song”
The quote marks make Google look for the exact phrase, maybe a song with the name “world’s best song” or a music article which contains this phrase.
Wildcard
Next, search on: world’s best *
This will look for all the best things in the world.
Excluding a word
Try searching on: the hand of god
Almost every hit will mention Diego Maradona since the most well known goal scored by him took that name. But, perhaps this is not what you are after. In this case you can use the — operator to exclude the word Maradona.
Try searching on: the hand of god -Maradona
This time you should find a so-called movie or something religious. None of the hits will mention Maradona.
(Something extremely interesting that happened to me while I was trying out these examples on my own is that after searching the hand of god -Maradona, and got to the so-called movie results, Google noticed my preference. When I re-entered “the hand of god”, without removing the word “Maradona” I was still getting the movie results! I will dedicate my next article to this phenomenon.)
Alternatives
Try searching: Mandelbrot Set (or instead of searching you can read my article about the mind-bending world of the Mandelbrot Set here 😉)
This search will look for pages that include both words. You can search for pages that contain one of these words by using the OR (must be written in uppercase letters) operator. Now, if you search mandelbrot OR set you will find different things like Benoit Mandelbrot and the definition of a set.
Site
Try searching on: animal rights:gr
The operator restricts the search to a particular internet domain, in this example gr, which is the top level domain for Greece (where I came from). All of the hits will be pages in the gr domain.
Another case for example is the domain ac.uk, which represents academic institutions (universities, libraries, museums, ect) in the UK.
Year
To search for pages from a given year or years you can use the … operator. Try these searches:
artificial intelligence 2025…2025
artificial intelligence 1998…2025
This does not work perfectly because it can also find results that they simply mention these years, but it is generally a good technique.
That’s all for today. Thank you for reading!
I hope you found those tips quite useful, unless you…
