How often do you cruise past the third Gooooogle o? For many of us, we expect to find what we’re seeking on the first or second page of the search results or we’re re-phrase our search and keep scouring. Use these simple shortcuts to produce better results for your searches.
Narrow down your search
When searching for information that may get clogged with the same term but a different item or category, place a hyphen (as a minus sign) before the term you want to exclude and Google will omit the pages with those words. Be sure to type a space before and not after hyphen.
Example: Coffee –Starbucks –Dunkin Donuts
Use file names
Google will only retrieve relevant files if you request specific file types. For Excel, PowerPoint and PDFs, this is a great trick (filetype: xls, ppt, pdf)
Example: Maytag washer manual filetype: pdf
Where did I see that again?
You may have forgotten to bookmark that great dress you saw while shopping online. Now you’re ready to spluge and you can’t recall which site it was on. Use intitle: “Theory dress” in your search. This will seek the term in the title bar of Web pages – don’t use a space between the colon and quotation marks for the phrase.
Example: intitle:“Theory Dress”
Clean it up
You may be interested in diets but goodness knows that you’re not interested in 345 new fad diets to lose that extra 5 pounds. Use quotation marks around the phrase and eliminate relative information that you’re not interested in finding.
Example: “raw food diet”
Simple tricks such as these can decrease time spent and increase the amount of relative results in your daily searches; make a habit of using these shortcuts and become the go-to info resource in your office!
