Here are 5 useful tips to help you find stuff faster, when you are using the Google search engine:
1. Use The 'Exact Phrase' Search Option
When you do a basic search, Google returns results for all web pages that contain the words you typed in.
For example, you may want find information about the movie Harry Potter. You might type in: Harry Potter
Google will return web pages containing both the keywords 'Harry' and 'Potter', somewhere on the page. You might find a web page containing a story, where the word 'Harry' is near the top of the page, and the word 'Potter' is at the bottom of the story. There might not be any mention of the exact phrase 'Harry Potter' anywhere on the page.
So, to narrow things down, put the phrase inside quotation marks like this:
"Harry Potter"
Note that the "" (quotation marks)
Now, Google will now only display results for web pages containing the exact phrase of "Harry Potter"
2. Be More Specific With Your Searches
To narrow down your search even further, you should try expanding on your initial keywords, by adding more specific words and phrases. If you are looking for a particular exact searching, give details to your search like this:
"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows"
This will weed out a lot of pages that contain information ONLY about "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows". Get it?
3. Remove Words From The Search Results
When you perform a search for "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows", you might get a lot of web pages in the search results for sites giving information about the movie. You could end up trawling through dozens of movie sites. You might want to exclude some keyword that could be the searching less accurate.
Here's what you can do…
For any search you perform, you can remove pages from the search results if they contain certain keywords you specify. To do this, all you have to do is add the word to the search box, and place a 'minus' symbol directly before it. Lets say, you want to search a website about "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" but you do not want to Google it with the keyword "Hermione". For example:
"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" -Hermione
This should make Google to exclude the keyword "Hermione" in the websites you're looking for. So easy, isn't it? However, make sure that there is 'no space' between the minus symbol and the word you want removed from the search results. If you put a space in between it won't work.
4. Use the 'OR' Command To Expand Your Search
Sometimes web pages will contain the information you want, but it might not contain the exact phrase you type in. Using our Harry example, some people might just refer to it as just 'Potter' without using the word Harry .
By using Google's 'OR' command you can find web pages containing at least one of the words you choose.
Harry OR Potter
The above search would return any web page that contains either just the word 'Harry' or the word 'Potter', or both of them on the same page. To make this work, you must type 'OR' in capital letters. This tells Google that you want to use their advanced search option. If it's in lower case, Google will just treat it like any other word.
5. Try Using The Synonym Search Option
For many phrases there are often alternative words that can be used to explain the same thing. Sometimes it's hard to know which particular word to use to get the best results. Other times you either may not be aware of the alternative word, or just can't think of it at the time.
For example, instead of using the term 'beautiful', you may have typed in 'handsome'. A trick you can use is to tell Google to look for synonyms of the words you specify, in addition to the main keyword. To do this, enter a tilde '~' just before a word like this:
~handsome
In this case, Google returned results containing the words: 'handsome' and 'beautiful'. This can be a useful trick to use if you can't think of the right words to type in. You can perform a synonym search on multiple words at he same time. Just add a tilde '~' directly before each word like this:
"Harry Potter" ~handsome
As well as 'handsome' and 'beautiful'; this search will now also return pages containing 'cute', 'gorgeous' and 'lovely', because they are synonyms for the word 'handsome'.
6. Try Using The "site:" command
The site: command enables you to search through a particular site. For instance, a searcher could look for references to "Harry Potter" in a certain website, let's say Mediafire.com by doing the following search:
Harry Potter site:mediafire.com
This way, you can search for keyword "Harry Potter" in the Mediafire site. This can be very handy if you want to search for musics, videos, and files. Just add the filetype in your searching, like this.
Harry Potter avi site:mediafire.com
With this way, Google will show up the "Harry Potter" videos with avi filetype. Very cool, isn't?
Note that with this command, there's no space between the colon and the URL. A search for www.site.com returns URLs that begin with www and a search for site.com returns URLs for all subdomains.
7. Looking for MP3s? Use this script.
Some of us didn't know how to search for mp3s in the internet. Some have no idea how to search for music clips in the internet. For example, I want to search for "hold it against me - britney spears" soundtrack. Using this script in Google, you can easily search for any music or videos in the internet.
hold it against me britney spears intitle:"index.of" "parent directory" "size" "last modified" "description" [snd] (mp4|mp3|mid|avi|mp4|3gp|flv) -inurl:(jsp|php|html|aspx|htm|cf|shtml|lyrics|mp3s|mp3|index) -gallery -intitle:"last modified" -intitle:(intitle|mp3)
You can replace the "hold it against me britney spears" keyword with the name of song you want to search. Pretty good tips isn't it?
Note that these tips are only used for educational purpose only. Regarding the musics and videos, you have to buy them in order to support the parties involved. I hope you found this useful, happy Google-ing!
