Every now and then, I would find myself “lost” in the world of information on the Net, especially when I’m researching for my projects.

So I have included below some tips on searching with Google. Hope they will proved handy in your quest for information!

3 Basic Search tips:

1. Provide appropriate keywords
Google fundamentally matches results based on your keywords provided. And now with stemming technology, Google attempts to produce results based on keywords having similar meanings to the one provided.

You can afford to be general in your keywords here, but do supply appropriate and meaningful keywords.

For e.g. if you’re searching for baseball team caps online, it would be better to supply keywords such as “baseball team caps” than “baseball caps” or “nice baseball caps”.

2. Use wildcards
You can use * in your search phrase if you have forgotten some of the words. As long as you still have the contents of your search phrase intact, Google will attempt to fill in the blanks for you.

3.Quotes
You can ask Google to search for a particular phrase by ending “” at the beginning and the end of your phrase (for e.g. “This is a phrase”). Google then displays results which contains the phrase.

Now, keeping the 3 basic search tips in mind, below are some of other cool things that you can do Google!

4.A Calculator
Just enter any numerical calculations in the search field, and search it. Google will interpret and calculates the answer as your first result. (Displayed together with the calculator icon).

It also does your unit conversions ranging from pounds to kg, miles to kilometers.

This calculator is so powerful, it even knows “the answer to life, the universe and everything” try it!

5. Isolate site/domain types with site:
With the site: command, you can specify Google to search within a particular domain type or within a web page.

For e.g. lions site: edu specifies Google to search on “lions” within websites with addresses containing “edu”.

for e.g. guitars site:www.guitars.com specifies Google to search only within the website: www.guitars.com for the search phrase, “guitars”.

6. Search linked pages with link:
link: allows you to search for pages which have links to the website specified in the search field. Bloggers and fellow SEO users might be interested to play around with this feature.

for e.g. link:tweakast.com searches for pages which have links to our blog.

7.Specify and search within a number range:
You can specify and search within a number range in Google such as the following search phrase:

Olympics 1996..2004

The above will return anything related to the Olympics within the year 1996 to 2004.

8.Search for music and movie reviews with movie: and music:
Google returns movie reviews and music reviews when you use movie: and music: within your search text respectively.

9. Use Google as a dictionary using define:
This is my favourite feature in Google! It functions as a dictionary checking up the meaning of the words entered into the search field. It also can explain definitions of acronyms too.

10. Filter specific file types with filetype:
This feature is also very useful for academic projects and researches. By specifying for e.g. “hand injuries filetype:pdf”, Google will only return pdf files with hand injuries contents.

Hope these tips help you in your daily surfing! Feel free to share other tips you might know, in the comments section. Google on!

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