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Millions of people each day use Google search for various reasons. Most people don't use it to its full potential. So today I'll show you 10 cool tips and tricks that you should be using with Google search. These tips will help you to be more efficient when searching the web and will help you get better search results. I've been using many of these search tips for years. I'll also include some new tricks for doing searches with Google that I just learned recently. Coming up next on TechGumbo, let's start off with the related results search.
If you want to find websites that are similar to other sites, in the search bar you would type related followed by a colon, and then you just put in the name of a website. I'll show you a couple quick examples. Let's first try to find sites similar to Google. You would put in related: then google.com and then hit enter. Now you see the results are sites similar to Google, like Bing and Yahoo. Let's try one more: related:facebook.com. And you see the results are ones that you would expect, like Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn, and so on and so forth. The related results search is a great way to discover websites that you may not know about.
Sometimes searching by file type can be useful, especially for students, teachers, or anyone conducting research that may be looking for a PDF, Word document, or any other file type. Here's how it works: In the search bar, first put in your search term followed by filetype:, and for this one I'll put in pdf. Now you'll see that most of the results are PDF links. I'll switch out the ending here and put in doc. Now you see I ended up with different results with links to doc files. The filetype search works with just about any file type extension.
Using search operators such as the plus or minus sign is a great way to get better search results. I'll show you an example doing a search for Tom Cruise. As you can see, the search results are quite varied. Let's suppose I just want the results related to Tom Cruise and Scientology. After typing in Tom Cruise, I would add in a plus sign before Scientology. If I wanted to completely omit any search results about Scientology, instead of the plus I would use a minus sign. I personally use search operators almost every day, and it does make searching on Google more efficient.
You all may know that using a phrase in quotes will only give you results that exactly match the words in order inside the quotes. For example, if I type in "may the force be with you," I'll only end up with results with that phrase. Using an asterisk replacing a word will give you variations on that phrase in the results. So I'll replace force with an asterisk. Now the results I have: "may the fourth be with you," "may the second be with you," and "may the code be with you." Using an asterisk is especially great for trying to find all forms of similar phrases or unknown words and phrases.
Using the word nearby at the end of a search will show you results of places closest to you. I'm always up for a good cup of coffee, so I'll search for "coffee nearby." Using the word nearby at the end of a search also works great for searching for restaurants or any other type of business.
You may run into times when you can't reach a website due to server problems or other issues, but you still want to view that site. So after doing a search, select the down arrow to the right of the URL. You will sometimes have two options: cached and similar. I find similar does not work that much. Now to find related sites, select cached. This will take you to a static view the last time Google snapped a picture of that site. I've also used the cached option in the past to view articles that are sometimes hidden behind paywalls, but this method is hit or miss.
There may be times that you want a different size of an image you found on a webpage. Using the Google image search is quick and easy. Using the Chrome browser, right-click on an image, select "Search Google for image" from the drop-down menu. This will open a new tab. Select "all sizes" to view every size of that image.
Doing a search within a specific website is one of the more useful search tricks. Let's say I want to find out what The Verge has written about augmented reality. In the search bar, I would type augmented reality followed by site:theverge.com. The search results will only include pages from that site regarding the search term. If you wanted a broader search but narrowed down to just educational sites, at the end just put .edu. Now the results about augmented reality are just from educational websites.
Searching by date is a great tool for limiting the time frame for search results. Using the same search query as the last example, select Tools, select Anytime. Here you have several options in the drop-down including Any time, Past hour, and others. I prefer the Custom range. You could use the calendar to the right to input your dates, but that takes a long time if you're going back several years, so I usually input the dates manually as shown. So I'll put in January 1st, 2015 to June 30th, 2015 and then hit enter. Now the search results are narrowed to specific dates within that range.
This is a quick one for those of you that play the stock market: To see how a stock is doing, if you know the company's ticker symbol, which is sometimes referred to as a stock symbol, just put that into the search bar. For Apple, it's AAPL. It looks like Apple's stock is up a little bit today. Let's try another: The parent company of Google is Alphabet Inc, whose ticker symbol is GOOG. You can increase the time frame to five days all the way up to max, which is the entire time that company has been publicly traded.
If you want to get more relevant search results, sometimes it's best to just search the titles of web pages. Here's how you do it: Just type in title: and then a search term, and this will give you all the pages with your search term in the title. I prefer to search titles with at least three keywords, so here's how you do that: In front of intitle, just type the word all to make allintitle, and for this one instead of just using Houston, I'll do "Houston hurricane relief." This is more useful and will only return results with all the keywords in the title. You can also search for terms and URLs of web pages; just replace the word title with url.
If you really want to narrow down your search results, Advanced Search just may be where you want to go. Head over to Settings and select Advanced Search from the drop-down menu. Here you'll have more than a dozen options for filtering your search. Just be careful when filtering; if you narrow your results too much, you could end up with very few or no results. After you've typed and selected all your parameters, click Advanced Search at the bottom of the page, and then you'll see all the search results.
Thanks for watching. Give this video a thumbs up if it was useful for you. Let me know in the comments if you know of a useful tip or trick not mentioned in this video that can be used with Google search. And if you haven't done so already, click on the subscribe button and bell notification icon for more tips, tricks, and other tech-related stuff from TechGumbo.