Searching information in Google is getting more important every time, however, although many people think is as simple as just writing down what you want in the search bar, this time we’ll surprise you with impressive tricks to google as professionals, saving time and finding what others don’t, discovering by the hand of experts the possibilities we have for free.
Googling as professionals
As we ventilated on the Deep Web topic analysis, even search engines can access only 5% of internet information, this percentage is immense and has growing proportions every day, so searching or “Googling” is increasingly complex, since search engines show little information based on their algorithms, our indications in the search bar are crucial to find more effectively what we require.
“Google’s slogan is that they are going to organize the world’s information. Our slogan is that we are going to give people tools to let them organize the world’s information. It’s a slightly different approach, based on the platform-ization of all of our capabilities and not thinking of ourselves as the organizer. “ Bill Gates
The above sentence from the Microsoft co-founder, reflects the Google’s target complexity, and it works as a useful base for us to get used to use the following tips when Googling and searching more efficiently, taking advantage of the additional aid that Google provides.
Searching with more precision when Googling
Search exact matches using quotes
If we require to get results that locate a word or phrase in particular, we have to enclose it in quotes, that way the Google’s algorithm will do the dirty work for us. For example, we may search “Our history in depth” and so, we will only see results that include this exact phrase.
Include or exclude words from the results with (+) or (-)
If you want the result to include a particular word, several words or a phrase, we can use the plus character (+), if what we want is the opposite effect we may use the subtraction character (-). For example, by searching “potatoes+tomatoes+lettuce-buy” we’ll find results mentioning potatoes, tomatoes, lettuce, but not including the word “buy”.
Searching by file type using “filetype”
The use of “filetype:” allows you to search documents according to the extension you want. For example, if you want to view documents in PDF format talking about Miami, we may search: “miami filetype: pdf”.
Filtering results with words in the URL using allinurl and inurl
The operator allinurl acts as a filter in your searches, telling Google to present only results where the search terms you entered are in the address of the page. For example, “allinurl:google zarza”.
If you want to scan any and not all (necessarily) in the URL, you use (inurl :).
Filtering results by Title using allintitle and intitle
The intitle and allintitle operators work to search all or some of the words respectively in the results’ title. Assuming we want to filter the results searching those including “SEO” and “Miami”, we could google “allintitle:seo miami”
Filtering results by coincidences in the text using allintext
By using the command allintext we will get results that include specifically in the text of the site, the word or phrase being searched, the way to use the command allintext is for example: allintext: word or phrase to search.
Googling by using the operators AND, OR, NOT and XOR
The operators are words that help to focus your search by linking the terms you use. The most common are the booleans: AND, to search for specific terms, OR to locate publications with all or some of the words, NOT to search for records that have the first term but not the second, and XOR that helps the search engine to locate some of the terms but not all of them.
Searching by using the wildcard *
The asterisk (*) is used for Google to replace the term with the most common searches. For example, “luxury house on*” will show results of the cities where most luxury houses are sought.
Other ways of Googling and making the most of Google
In addition to the above options, Google gives us other tools that not all our readers know to help us find what we look for.
See a website’s cache even if it’s not working
If the site or page you’re looking for is not available, we still can see the cache (or copy) that Google saved on its system at the moment of touring the site in question.
To do it we use “cache: address_we_want_to_see”, example: “cache:www.facebook.com/zarzacorp”
Knowing a specific city’s time
Google also lets us know the time of cities worldwide, for example, if we want to know the time in Miami, FL, we may search “time miami”, and we’ll get a similar result as shown below:
Search related pages when Googling
Use the option “related” to search for pages that have similar content to another. To do this, type the website address followed by “related:”. For example, if you find a site you like, you may use related:[insert the website’s URL] to access websites considered by Google as related to it.
Finding Similar terms
We may find synonyms by placing the ~ sign before the search term. For example, if you search for “Christmas ~ dessert recipes,” you will get not only dessert recipes, but also sweets, cakes and other delicacies for the palate.
Google has undoubtedly revolutionized the world, and knowing how to use these and other tricks is crucial to increase our productivity as users, and as professionals in each of our areas.
We hope you’ll keep this post on your favorites, we’ll be updating it as Google’s utilities indicate us.