Googling
Tips to Improve your Googling
Peter Grad, The Record (Hackensack, N.J.)
Published: Thursday, March 02, 2006
After e-mail, it's likely that the most frequent online activity is the search.
For better or worse, the days of thumbing through pages of a dictionary, thesaurus or encyclopedia for information are numbered. It's so much easier to just Google it.
Google is not the only search utility in town -- there's Yahoo, Dogpile, AltaVista and many others -- but it comes with such a formidable tools to focus your search that it is the engine of choice for many of us.
The trick to efficient Google searches is mastering its tools to get results faster and easier. Here are 10 tricks to do just that.
1. Find similar terms
And you thought the tilde character (~) served no useful purpose. When you insert the tilde in front of a search term, Google will retrieve sources matching the word as well as synonyms.
Searching "~conservative" will yield the National Libertarian Party, the National Republican Committee and the Right Wing News home page. Do not leave a space between the tilde and the search term.
2. Exclude terms
Sometimes a keyword will come up with items totally unrelated to the subject you are interested in. A student researching plasma in the cosmos would type in the word plasma and be forced to wade through scores of sites referring to plasma televisions.
The fastest way to solve this is to use the exclude function, the hyphen. Search "plasma -tv" and you will eliminate many irrelevant sites.
Though better, that may still not be good enough -- you'll wind up with sites using the word "television." Simply refine your search this way: "plasma -tv -television" and eliminate both terms from your results. (No need to use the word "and" or other punctuation.)
If you really want to be cool, combine your newfound skills and type "plasma -~tv" that will exclude all synonyms of TV.
3. Substitute for unknown words
Friends kid me that my memory is pretty
Peter Grad, The Record (Hackensack, N.J.)
Published: Thursday, March 02, 2006
After e-mail, it's likely that the most frequent online activity is the search.
For better or worse, the days of thumbing through pages of a dictionary, thesaurus or encyclopedia for information are numbered. It's so much easier to just Google it.
Google is not the only search utility in town -- there's Yahoo, Dogpile, AltaVista and many others -- but it comes with such a formidable tools to focus your search that it is the engine of choice for many of us.
The trick to efficient Google searches is mastering its tools to get results faster and easier. Here are 10 tricks to do just that.
1. Find similar terms
And you thought the tilde character (~) served no useful purpose. When you insert the tilde in front of a search term, Google will retrieve sources matching the word as well as synonyms.
Searching "~conservative" will yield the National Libertarian Party, the National Republican Committee and the Right Wing News home page. Do not leave a space between the tilde and the search term.
2. Exclude terms
Sometimes a keyword will come up with items totally unrelated to the subject you are interested in. A student researching plasma in the cosmos would type in the word plasma and be forced to wade through scores of sites referring to plasma televisions.
The fastest way to solve this is to use the exclude function, the hyphen. Search "plasma -tv" and you will eliminate many irrelevant sites.
Though better, that may still not be good enough -- you'll wind up with sites using the word "television." Simply refine your search this way: "plasma -tv -television" and eliminate both terms from your results. (No need to use the word "and" or other punctuation.)
If you really want to be cool, combine your newfound skills and type "plasma -~tv" that will exclude all synonyms of TV.
3. Substitute for unknown words
Friends kid me that my memory is pretty