Most of us use search engines as a regular part of our daily routine both at work and home. Many of you probably have no idea that you can easily do a lot more with search. Invest 5 or 10 minutes here and I will help you open up a new world of search using Google. I promise it will be time well spent!
Did you know that you can limit your Google search to a specific site?
Let's say you would like only to search the CNN/Money site looking for information on "Ford". All you need to do is... ford site:money.cnn.com
People tell me all the time that I need to add search to my site. While I agree and have not gotten around to it I always tell them that my sites are well indexed by the search engines and that they can search my site today. For example... "credit card" site:everydollarmatters.com ...currently yields 33 page hits.
Is your search as comprehensive as it could be?
If you are researching the term "website development" did you know that you are potentially missing a bunch of other good sites? There are over 1.1 million indexed pages using the term "web site". Try... "website development" OR "web site development" ...and you will get back the top pages using both spellings.
Maybe you are searching for a decent tutorial on html or an online course. Try... "html tutorial" OR "html training" online
Or (no pun intended), you might be shopping for a forum in some areas that are of interest to you.
"living green" forum OR "global warming" forum
OR is a nice expansive google search operator.
What can you do to narrow down your search?
Sometimes you are looking for a specific phrase. For instance... "getting your website online" yields 1230 pages as opposed to getting your website online which yields 114,000,000 million pages Using quotes around the phrase will limit the result to that specific phrase.
Maybe you are researching the JFK assasination. You could search for... "kennedy assassination" "kennedy assassination" video.
You can also limit your google search to specific areas of the internet. For example:
*Google Book Search - Search the full text of books
*U.S. Government - Search all U.S. federal, state and local government sites
*Universities - Search a specific school's website
To access this functionality just click on the "advanced search" hyperlink on the Google homepage. You will find these options towards the bottom of the page.
Often times you will receive page hits back that you are not interested in.
Suppose you were searching for the term six sigma and wanted to exclude all references to General Electric and Motorola. You could use the following search string... six sigma -ge -motorola -"general electric" ... The "-" minus sign is used to exclude certain keywords or phrases.
At my site you will find a "Quick Google Search Cheat Sheet". Happy searching.
