60minuteswiththegeeks

Googling with more power

Yeah we all know Google and we all use it. Most probable Google is the first place you turn to whenever you want to search for information on the web. But the question is this: how well do you know how to use Google? Google is a very powerful tool but do you know how to maximize its power? Do you know how to wedge more precise search results out of Google?

Here are some tips that enable you to squeeze more power out of Google, making finding information you need on the web faster and easier.

Casting the net a little wider: Making use of synonyms
The accuracy of your search result depends on how appropriate your keyword is to what you are looking for. A little trick that will increase the appropriateness of your keyword is to make use of synonyms. Let’s say you are looking for information on scholarships. You can cast the search a little wider if you make use of Google’s synonym functionality that searches not just based on the keyword ‘scholarship’ that you typed but also takes its synonyms into consideration i.e. grant, bursary, studentship, subsidy, allowance, loan.
To make use of the synonym functionality, just precede your keyword with the tilde sign (~) That is, you would type: ~scholarship

Restricting your search to a website:
Ever found yourself trying to remember where on a particular website an information you need is? You remember reading that section of the website, but you didn’t save the page or bookmark it, so now relocating it again is such a fuss? Especially if the site is so overloaded with lots of information. Well it is for situations like this that Google’s ability to restrict a search to a particular domain or website comes in handy. So let say on Toshiba’s website, you want to search for the occurrence of A75-s226 which represents a laptop model, you will type:

Site:www.toshiba.com “A75-s226”

So the whole of the web won’t be queried for the model “A75-s226” just the site: www.toshiba.com.

Weeding out redundancies
Ever found yourself searching for a particular subject and you end up getting a whole lot of other results that does not correlate with want you are looking for, thereby making it difficult to see and pick the results that are useful to you? Well, here is how to weed out redundant results from your search results: use the ‘-’ operator.
Let’s say you search for information on speed boats but you keep getting results on canoe, ship, Atlantic Ocean etc. things you don’t need. To remove these redundancies from your search result just append the minus sign (-) in front of the words you want to weed out. That is:
Speed boat –canoe –ship –Atlantic Ocean

Specifying word or phrase
This is like the opposite of weeding out redundancies. This allows you to search for information that ranges over more than one domain. For example if what you are looking for is water transportation and you feel information on speed boats, canoe, ship and boats will be needed, then you can include them by appending the plus sign (+) in front of the other keywords. That is, you would type:
Water Transportation +Speed boat +canoe +ship +boats

Searching the title
The search operator “intitle” comes in handy when you want to search for documents whose title contains the specified phrase or word. For example typing:
allintitle:star wars
will find all sites with the word star and wars in the title.

Searching the URL

You could restrict search only to URL’s. This could come in handy if you are looking for URL’s that contain particular set of word(s). A particular situation in time past that this function has been helpful was a time I couldn’t remember the address of a certain website. All I could remember was a particular word that was in the URL. So I just queried, searching for all websites that has that name in their URL: the website I was looking for came out amongst the first 10 results. To use this functionality, you write:
allinurl: the keyword you are looking for

Using the LINK operator
Using the link operator restricts results to sites containing links to the specified location. For example a query of this form:
Link:http://www.geekabyte.blogspot.com
will return a list of sites that have links pointing to the site: geekabyte.blogspot.com

Searching for specific file type
You can use Google to limit search to a specific file format. A query of this form:
filetype:pdf geekabyte
will return PDFs containing the word geekabyte, while
filetype:xls java
will return Excel spreadsheets with the word java

Finding Similar Sites
With Google, you could find other sites whose contents are similar to a referencing site. You use the similar operator for this function. For example you know of just one site, www.hausarecipes.com that offers Hausa recipes but you are interested in finding more of such sites, you will construct your query to look like:
Related:http://www.hausarecipes.com
Did a similar search on www.techcrunch.com and these were the first 6 results I got:
kottke.org
SiliconBeat.com
Gizmodo.com
BoingBoing.net
Engadget.com
scripting.com

This is definitely not an exhaustive list of all the operators Google has to offer, but with these few, you certainly should be able to beef up your search using Google.