We spend hours each day online and now rely heavily on having information at our fingertips. As at August 2011 Google owns the Search engine market powering 66.1% of all online searches. Its closest rival, Yahoo, has only a fraction of the volume at 14.5%. Chances are, you are a Google user too.
A study by online research and analytics firm Experian Hitwise last month shows 67.6% of Google searches were deemed successful. Many friends call me a ‘Google Ninja’ as my quest for information sees me constantly hitting ‘Search’ and in doing so I’ve managed to pick up some quick tips for making finding what you’re looking for even easier and it will save you time.
Here’s my top Google search tips…
1. Use double quotes (“ “) around a set of words to find the exact phrase eg: “Richie McCaw” will search only for that exact phrase in that order and will exclude any variants such as Richard McCaw, Richie Mc Caw etc
2. You can easily exclude terms by adding a minus sign. The minus sign should appear immediately before the word and should be preceded with a space. Eg; searches for the animal jaguar, you may wish to enter jaguar –cars so all sites with references to cars are excluded from the results.
3. The dollar sign ($) is used to indicate prices. Nikon 400 and Nikon $400 will give different results. Most other punctuation is ignored.
4. The *, or wildcard. If you include * within a query, it tells Google to try to treat the star as a placeholder for any unknown term(s) and then find the best matches. For example, query Obama voted * on the * bill will give you stories about different votes on different bills.
5. You can search within a specific website eg: search only The Australian newspaper online for articles on SME’s enter the search term SME site:theaustralian.com.au
6. You can also specify a whole class of sites, eg: searching for F-111 information on a government site, F-111 site:.gov.au will return results only from a .gov domain or F-111 site:.au will return results only from Australian sites.
