30 Incredibly Useful Google Search Tips And Tricks

There are many commands and modifiers you can add to your Google searches to get better results. You can narrow searches to a single site, look for exact phrases, search using an image instead of text and much more. There are also special Google pages and sites that Google offers with tons of useful information.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you thirty useful Goggle search tricks.
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So there are a whole bunch of cool little things that you could type into a Goggle search to get different results. Some will really help you do research or find what you're looking for. Others go to directly to specific pieces of information. So I'm going to start with the tip that I use most often myself. That is to type the word site followed by a colon followed by a website. Make sure you include NO spaces at all in this. Then after the website name hit a space and then type your search term. This will narrow down the searches to only results for that website. This is great when you know that you just want to search that one site or you know the answer is at a particular site and you don't want to see any other search results.
The resulting list will only show you search results at that domain name. Notice it doesn't matter about the prefix here. en.wikipedia.com comes up just as well as wikipedia.com. So don't worry about whether it's www or something else. When you want to search for an exact phrase and make sure that the results absolutely have to include that phrase put quotes around it. It's okay to combine this with other things. So I can type other search terms here after the quotes or before the quotes as well.
If you want to search for something and make sure that something doesn't appear there you can use the minus symbol. You should get results that do not include whatever is after the minus. Although, apparently, that doesn't include the ads. But the search results do actually follow that rule. Notice I have no space there between minus and the word that I want to exclude. You can also use an asterisk to represent a missing word. You can get some interesting search results this way. Then you can find, maybe, what it is you couldn't remember but also variations.
If you ever find a website you like and want to find more websites like it you can use related followed by colon, then the website and you'll get a list of sites related to that website according to Goggle. Goggle's got a built in dictionary. All you need to do is type the word define followed by a space, then the word, and you'll get a dictionary definition. If you replace define with the word etymology you actually get the history of the word. 
If you want to know what time it is in a specific location just type time and then space and then the name of the location. You can use a city name, a country name, all sorts of things. If you want to know a stock price or specific information about a stock you don't have to go to a special website. You could just type the symbol into Goggle, hit return, and you'll get a market summary. 
Now just like with Spotlight you can use Goggle for calculations. You can make them pretty complex things with parentheses and functions and get results. Then it takes you into this little calculator mode where you can actually do more calculations. You can also do conversions just using the word to. So, for instance, I can do 5 km to miles like that and I'll get the conversion and then this little conversion app where I can continue to work with different numbers. You can also look up nutritional information. So the way to do that is to type something like how much and then what you're looking for, like sugar, in and then a product. Then it will give you results here telling you that. You can substitute different things. So instead of sugar I can look up, you know, protein and instead of apple I could do banana.
You can get random numbers from Goggle a number of ways. For instance you could say roll a dice and you get this little animation here with a random number. You can say flip a coin and another animation with a random coin side. You could also say random number between and then something like one and twenty and get a random number there. Then you could actually set a minimum and maximum and generate a new random number as a result. 
You can use two dots to search for a range of numbers. So something like this and you'll get results that include any numbers in there. You can use or to search for one thing or another to get both sets of results together. But notice I get something different if I capitalize OR. It's going to give me results for two different searches combined rather than searching for both things on the same page.
Now if you want to search for something and make sure that those exact words are in the title of the page you can use intitle followed by a colon and then what you're searching for. Usually it's more than one word so you want to put quotes around it. This will only give me results for the title of the page that has those two words. If I didn't include intitle you can see I get very different results. 
You can use location followed by a colon and then a location name to narrow your search by area. For instance this will give a general result here but if I do location then I'll get specific results for just that area. 
If you ever get a phone call from an area code you don't recognize you can always type area code followed by the three digits and it will give you the location. The same thing for zip code. You'll just see it here on the right on a map. Also if you have an address but for some reason you don't have the zip code you can type the address into Goggle and then hit return and it will return to you the address here complete with the zip code.
You can search for a ton of general information on Goggle and come up with special screens of information. For instance you can search for sport's scores, movie times, weather. One example here is searching for a flight status. So we can search for a flight by its number and you can see you get detailed information here about the flight. Whether it's on time and things like that. 
Another one I love to use that's really hard to demonstrate is package tracking. So when you get one of those package tracking numbers, you know, from UPS or FedEx or somewhere you can take that exact number and just put that into Goggle and it'll take you right to a tracking page.
Through Goggle you can setup a timer. So you can do set timer for 10 minutes and you get this little countdown timer here. Of course you can easily just put this in another window and put it off to the side if you need a timer. Notice there's also a stopwatch functionality here in this little Goggle app.
Goggle will also give you a direct answer if you need to find a specific day for one of those holidays that changes every year. You can see it just gives you the results here at the top. 
You can access a lot of Goggle functionality, not when you type the search term, but after you get results. Then at the top you can select different categories. So, for instance, I can narrow the search down by News, Shopping, I can go to Images and then there are a lot more options here under images. In addition in big categories like that if you click Tools you can get to do things like narrow down by Time. I find this extremely useful when searching for technical information. You get a lot of old information and just going to say, Past Month or Past Year, will usually get you to the search results you want. 
Now the main Goggle search page is, of course, Goggle.com. You can type things in your address bar or go to Goggle.com and type them here. But there's also a special page called Goggle.com/advanced_search. If you go here you can do a lot of the things we just talked about but it's all kind of spelled out for you so it's easier to see what's available. This is very useful if you're doing research.
Now if you definitely know you want images as a result you can start by going to images.goggle.com and search there. But you'll also find a little camera icon here. Instead of searching for an image by typing a description you can click on this and then drag and drop an image into here. Then you get results based on the image. So here the only information Goggle had was this picture of Big Ben. But you can see it figured out what it was. It gives me search results based on that and other images that are similar to it. 
One website that a lot of people don't know about is the Goggle Crisis Map Site. Goggle.org/crisismap. It will show you things like the location of wild fires, and warnings, and all sorts of disaster information like where tropical storms are located and things like that. You can move around on the map through the entire world and zoom in and see specific information about different areas. It's very useful when the news is being vague about some sort of disaster and you really want to zoom in to be able to find out where people are affected.
If you go to the Goggle homepage instead of typing the address bar sometimes you'll be treated to special artwork to commemorate a special event or something on that day.  Sometimes they're even interactive. If you want to go look at history of all those things called Goggle Doodles just got to Goggle.com/doodles. There's also Goggle.com/sky. I love this because you can go to this historical sky map here and you can actually see the constellations although, of course, they're reversed. You can then look at something and then turn off historical and actually see the stars there. You can really zoom in on things to see them. You also have a Goggle Moon Map as well. Also Mars too.
Hope you found these tips useful. I know there are more. If you've got a favorite one that I've missed leave it in the comments below.

Comments: 8 Responses to “30 Incredibly Useful Google Search Tips And Tricks”

Leonard Tisi

5 years ago

Great Video as always!! I was wondering if you could put a link to a list that has all 30 of the shortcuts you mentioned in this video and the shortcuts meaning? As a .pdf or just for printing out to have it handy.
Thanks,
Leonard

Colleen Smitherman

I use scholar.google.com a lot to get the latest information on health issues. You can set up searches and have a list of research articles emailed weekly. Most of the time, you can only read the abstracts but they provide a lot of information and it is more reliable that what is floating around on the net.

Gary Rosenzweig

Leonard: I don't have that, sorry. I may consider doing a list like that, but on paper people would probably expect it to be "complete" rather than just 30. And there are potentially 100s.

Robert

Is there a shortcut that will produce results dated after/before a certain date e.g. superbowl after/before 1/1/85

sury suryanarayanan

Thanks a lot for such helpful video and I wish to echo the comment by Leonard Tisi that you could put all these as a .pdf or just for printing out to have it handy.

Robert: Try "before:YYYY-MM-DD" and "after:YYYY-MM-DD" and see if that works. No space after the colon.

Dally Messenger

Great one Gary - so interesting - another world of wonder.

Chris

When I want to continue a search from some time in the near past (or just see sites I've visited in Chrome) I use myactivity.google.com.

Comments Closed.

30 Incredibly Useful Google Search Tips And Tricks

Comments: 8 Responses to “30 Incredibly Useful Google Search Tips And Tricks”

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