I got such a positive response from my Google Search Secrets newsletter last week, I decided to share a few more search tips. Here goes.
Continuing from last week…
If you want to find an exact phrase, put the request in quotes (“”). Google will only display web pages that contain the exact phrase, not variations of the words within the phrase. This narrows your search considerably and is helpful when you want to find a certain person’s name, for example.
If you want to search within a certain website, after the search word or phrase put “site:” followed by the domain name. So let’s say you’re doing some research on global warming and want to find everything related to it on the NYTimes.com site.
Enter:
global warming site:nytimes.com
or
“global warming” site:nytimes.com
Only pages on the NYTimes.com site will appear.
Maybe you want to find sites with a certain extension (.com (commercial sites), .edu, (educational/college sites), .org, (organizations, NPOs), .gov, (government), .mil (military), etc.).
Just add “site:” plus the extension (without the period).
Type in:
positive psychology site:edu
Only sites about positive psychology that end in .edu will appear.
You can exclude certain words from a search by putting a hyphen (dash) before the word. This is helpful when searching for words with multiple meanings. For example, this search:
jaguar -cars -football –os
results in the cats and excludes references to the Jaguar car, the Jacksonville Jaguars, and the Macintosh operating system.
You can also put a hyphen before the site: operator (mentioned above) to exclude certain sites from your search, i.e, -site:nytimes.com
When you need to fill in the blanks, use the wildcard operator: the asterisk (*). When you know part of a phrase, but not all, insert the asterisk and Google will fill in the blanks for you.
For example:
“between a rock and a” *
results in hard place, stone, pineapple, etc.
Google is great for finding local movie show times. Here’s the syntax:
showtimes (name of movie) (postal/zip code)
Type in:
showtimes The Expendables 37167
results in
The Expendables showtimes for Smyrna, TN 37167
1hr 43min – Rated R – Action/Adventure – Trailer – Reviews:
Malco Roxy Cinema – 100 Movie Row, Smyrna, TN – Map
12:05 2:35 5:05 7:35 10:00pm
Carmike Wynnsong 16 – Murfreesboro – 2626 Cason Square Boulevard, Murfreesboro, TN – Map
12:10 1:00 2:35 3:35 5:00 6:05 7:25 8:30 9:50pm