Google is a well known and highly used internet web search engine. It provides many features beyond the word search capability including: synonyms, weather forecasts, time zones, stock quotes, maps, earthquake data, movie showtimes, airports, home listings, sports scores and many more. There are also special features for numbers, including ranges (40..43), prices, temperatures, money/unit conversions , calculations, package tracking, patents, area codes, and language translation of displayed pages.
Accessing the information that we need with Google search is easy; all you need to do is type the word or phrase of what you are looking for in the search box, click on the search button, and Google shows content relevant to your search. It’s very practical to have needed information right at your finger tips, but looking through all the relevant content to your search can become a bit scrutinizing and time consuming. To make the most of your searches on Google, here are some useful tips that can help you customize your search and speed up the process.
- Explicit Phrase: Enclose the phrase of the content that you are looking for within double quotes for an explicit find. For example: “social media marketing”
- Exclude Words: If you want to exclude content from a particular search phrase, use the ”-” sign in front of the word you want to exclude. Example Search: social media marketing –advertising
- Site Specific Search: If you want to search for a website for content that matches a certain phrase, you can use Google to search the site like the following example “Social media marketing” site:www.somesite.com
- Similar Words and Synonyms: When wanting to include aword in your search, but also want to include results that contain similar words or synonyms, you can use the “~” in front of the word like this: “social media marketing” ~professional
- Search for Specific Document Types: To search for a specific document type, you can use the modifier “filetype:”. For example: “social media marketing” filetype:ppt
- Search This OR That: Google includes all the terms specified in the search by default, so if you want to look for any one of one or more terms to match, you can use OR in capital letters as shown in this example: “social marketing OR advertising”
