A few Google tricks

With an estimated 1.1 billion unique monthly visitors, Google is by far the world’s most popular search engine. Bing (300 million) and Yahoo (250 million) certainly have their fans, but still trail the search giant.

By now most people know they can search specific terms and even localize them by adding a location (e.g., Japanese restaurant Cary NC). What you might not know is that Google lets you further refine searches within more specific parameters.

Following are some interesting tricks to further refine Google searches.

Search within a site

Websites use any number of engines for internal searches, but you can also use Google to search within a website. I’ve actually found articles through this method that I wasn’t able to locate using the site’s search box.

Type: site: (domain name) (term)

Example: site: www.carynews.com Mayor Weinbrecht

Exact query

Put your search term within quotation marks to return searches with that specific term.

Example: “Our Town” (play title vs. the generic term)

Exclude items

Use a minus sign to exclude terms within your search.

Type: (search term) –(term to exclude)

Example: Tom Jones –singer (if you’re looking for information about the novel, movie or individual other than the pop singer)

Related sites

To find websites similar to ones you like.

Type: similar:(domain name)

Example: similar:www.imdb.com (to find websites similar to the popular movie database site)

Searches related to…

Scroll down in your search results to find suggestions for similar searches. Google usually suggests about eight other related search terms.

For example, the search results for “smartphone cases” returned these other suggested search terms: “lg smartphone cases,” “smartphone cases reviews,” “smartphone cases brands,” “smartphone covers” and more.

Take some time to play around with these query types and you’ll discover how flexible Google can be in terms of returning different search results. Happy Googling!