Summary
Searching on Google seems to be a simple task. Go to the website and enter what you want to find. However, if the results aren’t giving you exactly what you want, there are tricks to filter the results down to exactly what you’re looking for. In this episode, we begin two-part series on tricks that can improve your searches.
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Transcript
Search engines become popular when they are the most useful. It’s the reason Google rose to prominence so quickly. However, almost every search engine contains additional features that can help you find what you’re looking for. Over the next two days, I’ll share ten tricks that can help you search like a pro.
For Personal Tech Media, this is Two Minute Tech. I’m Jim Herman.
First, if you want to search for a specific phrase, put that phrase in quotation marks. However, be careful when you use this trick because one wrong word can make the search engine throw out many results that you might want.
Second, if you want results from a specific site, add site, colon, followed by the website address. So, for example, if you’re looking for something on this podcast’s website, you can just search site:twominute.tech.
Third, to exclude words from your search results, type a minus sign followed by that word. For example, if I’m searching for the soccer team Chicago Fire, I might type -television so I reduce the number of results related to the TV show Chicago Fire.
Fourth, use Google to do math. You can type in any math equation using the plus sign, the minus sign, the asterisk to multiply, or the slash to divide. You can also do conversions between distances, currencies, temperatures, and more.
And fifth, if you need to search for a particular type of file such as a PDF, just type filetype (all one word), colon, PDF. This will limit the search to files of that specific type.