Search has become an integral part of people’s daily life. It is the most used application on a smartphone, and a crucial tool in everyone’s life. If you want to find information on a topic, you would type in the word or phrase into the google search bar at the top of your screen and hit enter.
You can find most of your information on via search if you know how to efficiently use it but there are some tips and tricks that can make the task even easier. In this article, we’ll go over some surprising and useful things that you can do with Google.
Quick Calculations =
Google Search is the easiest way to find a solution to a math problem. It can do all sorts of calculations from simple sums to complicated equations.
Use Google Search as a quick calculator by starting with “=” and typing out the equation into the search engine. You can also use “x” or “*” instead of equals if you want to divide or multiply. For example, typing “=100+5*9” will output 145 as your answer.
“Quotation Marks”
When searching for an exact phrase, enclose it in quotes to limit your results to web pages that contain your search term exactly as you entered it.
Quotes let you search exactly for the word and all results will have your term in it. If you want to search for a phrase, put quotes around the phrase and not just one word. For example, typing “Ashley Tan” gives you all Ashley Tan search results without just “Ashley” or just “Tan”.
Hyphens –
Google search helps users find information by providing a list of relevant results but sometimes you might not want certain words or results. If you want to exclude a term from your search, include a hyphen before that word.
This is called an “exclusion term” and it tells Google that it shouldn’t show any pages with that word in them. For example, if you are looking for information on dolphins the animal and not the professional football team enter “dolphin -football” for articles on your preferred topic of interest.
Site:
“Google site:” is a search operator that makes it possible to search within a specific website. It’s especially useful when you want to do research on a company or organization, but need more specific or in-depth information than what would be available in the company’s general search results.
For example, if you wanted to find out what MSGT had on the subject of food, you would first search “site:msgt.com.sg food” and it would bring up relevant articles from our website about this topic.
Two Periods ..
Google also has a feature that most people don’t even know about and that is the ability to search within a specific number range. The first period is for the search engine to find all of the pages that are within the page range.
The second period is for the engine to find all of the webpages that are within those exact 2 number ranges. For example, typing “movies 1980..2000” will tell google to crawl the internet for information on movies from 1980 – 2000.
Location:
Location-based searches on Google News provides easy and instant access to headlines and news related to a particular location. This includes news about countries, regions, towns, and neighborhoods.
The following types of searches can be used for city names (e.g Sydney), countries (e.g Singapore), state names (e.g California), or regions (e.g Africa). For example, typing “Elon Musk location:sanfrancisco” will find you news related to Elon Musk at a particular location which in this case is San Francisco.
Filetype:
Google is an invaluable resource for writers. It provides the opportunity to search for information about any topic you are interested in. We can also filter our search by file types through the use of this feature.
For example, if one is looking for graphics, they can use “filetype:jpg” on Google. If one is looking for PDFs, they can use “filetype:pdf”. One can change the parameters as per their needs and requirements to see the many links that offer the same file type.
Some of these tips will be familiar to most people, while others will be less well-known. In any case, we hope these googling tips can help you find information quickly and easily, no matter what it is that you’re looking for.
