While Google is straightforward, it’s worth knowing that most Google searchers can, with just a bit more inside information, can become really super searchers. When I teach classes on how to search with Google, here are the top few key ideas that make people much faster in their searches, and able to discover things they never knew existed.
1.
Find a word on the page. Ever do a search and then discover that you’re on a very long web page with no idea where your search terms are? This happens fairly often, and the most important skill to have is the ability to find a word on the page. As it happens, your internet browser has this ability already built-in. Just look for the Edit menu at the top of the internet window. Click on it and you’ll see the submenu item labeled “Find.” If you click on that, you’ll see a small window that let’s you search for any word on the page. This is a lifesaver when you’re searching for a particular word and it’s found only on the 10th screen down.
If you do this often enough, or search for more than a single word at a time, you should consider installing the Google Toolbar. Here’s why…
2.
Install the Google Toolbar to speed up your searching. Google offers a free toolbar for all the different internet browsers. The Toolbar lets you do a plethora of things to help you search, including bookmarking good web pages that you find, translating terms you see on the page, spell-checking, and instant searching on other Google properties (like Google Books, Google Maps, Google News, etc.). But the one Google Toolbar feature that is very useful to power users is the highlight button.
If you do a search on Google and end up on a page (say, the Wikipedia page about Purple Moorhens), when you click on the highlighter button, it will highlight all the appearances of your search terms on that page. So if you’ve searched for [ purple moorhen Ghana ] and gone to the Wikipedia page, clicking the highlighter will highlight all three of those words in different, highly visible colors. This is a real timesaver for pages with small fonts or long, complex articles.
3.
Learn about the different Google search properties. Everyone knows that Google lets you search the web, and most people know that Google lets you search for images and videos. But did you know that Google also lets you search through the collected news archives going back to the mid-1800s? And you can use Google to search for scanned copies of books and magazines (books.Google.com), financial information about companies you care about (
www.Google.com/finance), scholarly articles from scientific journals and conferences (
www.Google.com/scholar), and blogs (blogsearch.Google.com).
What’s more, Google also has a number of services that you can use to be a super searcher. Google Translate can transliterate words from English to Spanish, French, German, and Chinese and so on. You can also use this service to translate entire documents or web pages to/from different languages. While the translations aren’t quite as good as the best human translators, if your working knowledge of Swedish is as low as mine, Google Translate will be a powerful tool. (Translate.Google.com). Additionally Google Web Search is available in several GH languages….. Huasa, Ga, Akan!!!!!!!!
4.
Use short, simple queries that get to the point. A common mistake beginner searchers make is to use too many words in their query. If you’re still searching for the Purple Moorhen, a poor query is one that uses too many words that aren’t really relevant to the topic. For example, [purple bird I saw at the Mole National Park last Tuesday afternoon] is not a good query. The key thing you want to search out is information about the bird. All the extra words about “I saw at” or “last Tuesday afternoon” just aren’t relevant. Worse than that, all those extra words actually decrease the accuracy of the search results. Keep your search queries crisp and to the point.
5.
Use the Advanced Search options. All of the Google search properties have an “Advanced Search” feature for searchers who want a little more control over their searches. Look for the blue “Advanced Search” text to the right of the search button on all of the Google search pages. You’ll find Advanced Search for regular web search, image search, and map search and so on.
With Advanced Search you can easily search for web pages that are ONLY in a particular language, or that come from a particular site (you could use this to search only for articles in Dailyguide.com just select the option “Search within a site or domain” and put dailyguide.com in the slot), or just for documents written in the past month or year. This is a powerful tool to help you focus in on just the results you want, from the time you want, from the websites you prefer.
6.
Use DEFINE: to learn what a word really means. Of all the advanced features in Google, DEFINE: is probably one of the best for advanced searchers to use to educate themselves about a complex world. All DEFINE: does it to search for definitions of terms (or phrases) as they’re actually used in writing that’s found on the web. For example, you might think you know what a “credit derivative” is, but by doing the Google query [ DEFINE: credit derivative ] you can find out for sure. The great thing about DEFINE: is that it’s not dictionary-based, so as new words and phrases enter the language, Google picks up on the words and phrases. A case in point, [DEFINE: ROTL] or [DEFINE:BRB], both are common in instant messaging and text messages, but haven’t yet reached any conventional dictionaries. As you can see, DEFINE: is especially handy for working out the meaning of new, ephemeral, possibly transient terms that come into the language through teens, technology and game-playing.
7.
Use context search terms judiciously to get to the kind of result you want. Often searching for a particular kind of result will be hidden in the midst of many other web pages on that topic. In this case, you should consider adding a “context” term to your search query that describes the kind of result you’d like to see. For example, if you’re trying to quickly learn about a new technology or area, it’s sometimes difficult to find materials at a level appropriate for the beginner. In such a case, what you’d really like to see is background material, or perhaps a tutorial. Need to learn about superconductor technology quickly? Use a search that includes a context term such as “tutorial.” [ superconductor technology tutorial ] is an excellent search that will bring tutorials on this topic to the top of your search results page. Other context terms that people find useful are DIY or how to (to find do-it-yourself guides),guideline (to find suggestions and guides), curriculum, lesson plans, and summary are all good context terms to help find particular kinds of content .
8.
Use the minus sign to eliminate unwanted results. Sometimes you need to eliminate some redundant or intrusive results from the results that come back after your Google query. If, for example, you’re searching for the jazz standard song, that recorded by Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, and others, that includes the lyric "It was just one of those things", but the song in question is NOT Cole Porter's "Just one of Those Things"?
If you do the obvious query [ “It was just one of those things” Billie Holiday ] you’ll see that the Cole Porter song "Just one of those things" invades the search results. That’s a very popular song (at least on the web), so we need to exclude those Cole Porter results somehow.
Whenever you find unwanted results "invading" your search results page with hits that are close, but not really right, that's a call to use the minus (or hyphen) as a way to remove unwanted results.
So if you change the query to be [ “it was just one of those things Billie Holiday” -Porter ] you’ll eliminate all the Cole Porter songs that aren’t what you’re looking for!
Note that MINUS sign in front of the term "Porter." That’s the special Google tool for removing any search result with that term (Porter) from the results. I chose to do -Porter because I didn't know if all the songs would have "Cole" in the attribution (as opposed to saying "C. Porter").
The big point here is that I chose a relatively uncommon term ("Porter") that would knock out any of the songs he'd written, but leave everything else.
Now the results are pretty good. All of the top ten hits were exactly the thing I was looking for. "Come Rain or Come Shine" by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer.
9.
Use FILETYPE: to find documents of a particular kind. It’s not uncommon to be looking for a particular kind of information—say an Excel spreadsheet or a Powerpoint presentation on a given topic. For this, you really want to use the FILETYPE operator to help limit your searches to just the kind of thing you want to locate. Suppose you’re a high-school teacher and you really need some ideas about how to teach the concept of superconductivity in your next physics class. The query [ superconductor high school FILETYPE:PPT ] will find you many different lessons (in PPT format) that you can download and get inspiration from their design. (This way you can use your context terms AND limit by file type.)
10.
Use date-limits to find documents from a particular date range. When I’m doing research on a bit of history, it’s often useful to use Google News to search for news on a given topic. News is easy to filter by date. But few people know you can ALSO filter regular web results by publication date as well. For instance, if you do a search like [Ghana economy] you’ll see a lot of hits about the Ghanaian economy. When you open the left-hand “More search tools” sub-panel, you can click on the “Timeline” view to show a histogram of documents by publication date. What’s more, if you click on “Last year” – you’ll see that the hit list changes to show only documents published within the past 12 months, which might be more useful to you.
All in all, there is a wealth of content available to the searcher with a little practice and a little bit of insider knowledge about how to make the search engine work. With these tips, you’ll be an expert in almost no time. Like everything else in life, practice makes perfect, and keeping on top of what’s new in Google will pay off in the future. To stay in tune with what’s going on, I recommend reading the Official Google blog, not just to see the announcements of new kinds of content that is being added to the world-wide web, but also to see what new tools and capabilities are being added to Google. The web changes daily—it gets larger, more complete and will increasingly have things that you really need to be able to find. So too does Google constantly improve its search capabilities and services. Stay in touch to keep being an expert searcher. Search on!
While Google is straightforward, it’s worth knowing that most Google searchers can, with just a bit more inside information, can become really super searchers. When I teach classes on how to search with Google, here are the top few key ideas that make people much faster in their searches, and able to discover things they never knew existed.
