Successful searching: making Google work for you
By Gabriela from the Student Team
Google — we all know it, we all use it, but do you know how to take advantage of its full potential? Trawling through thousands of results is a tedious time-waste. This is your chance to claw back that precious time, so you can spend more hours doing work, watching dog videos or caring for your beloved houseplants — whatever floats your boat.
Reverse Image Search
The fact that you can use voice search is pretty well known by now, but did you know, there is also an option to search by image? You can insert an image in the search box, either by uploading it or by pasting its URL, and you’ll be able to find more visually similar photos. Try it out — if you upload a an image of yourself, Google should return even more of the photos you made available online.
Privacy and Preferences
Online privacy has been part of big debates lately, so if that’s a concern, we might have a solution. Startpage search engine allows you to make Google searches without your IP address or location being tracked.
To make the most of Google you could also try customizing your search settings. That way you’ll be able to set instant predictions, number of results per page, language and location. You can set a custom time range for search results and get results as recent as the last hour. There is also an option of SafeSearch, which blocks explicit content.
Searching like a Sleuth
Many people don’t realise that Google has the tools to narrow your search down, helping you nail down what you’re looking for. It’s just a few extra characters added to your search term, like these:
Using double quotes (“ ”) can help you search for a specific phrase. All the results will have the given phrase in the same order as listed (very useful when looking for song lyrics!). You can also use search operators to make your search even more targeted. OR is used to give either-or words, meaning the results will have any of those words, while AND is used for must-have words, so the results will necessarily contain any of the words you list.
The asterisk (*) can be used to search for unknown words, for example if you’re looking for a phrase but can’t fully remember it; Google lists results having any word in the place of the asterisk in the search query. Minus (–) excludes words from the search so results without those words will appear. AROUND is used to do a proximity search and tell that the given words should be near to each other in the content.
You can search within a specific website by putting “site: (websitename.com) plus keywords”. This saves you from going through undesirable results if you already know where you should be looking. The same is possible for searching for files, by typing “filetype: format keyword”. This is very handy when you’re searching for presentations or PDFs whose extensions you know.
This is just a quick snapshot of many functions of Google. It’s useful for finding synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation and can even make anagrams! It can also solve calculations, convert time zones and currencies and a load more. Why not use what you’ve learned, and google how to best use Google!
