A dozen tips for better Google Search results
With dozens of daily queries, you probably have a good grasp of Google. You type in a few words, hit enter, scour for a second, reword your search phrase, hit enter again, and repeat until you find what you’re looking for. You may not know exactly how precise you can be with your search terms, all without ever having to click the somewhat hidden Advanced Search feature. All you need to know are some operators and symbols to quickly cut through the muck and narrow your search results.
1. Search only specific sites or domains
If you happen to be looking only for results from a specific website, you can limit the scope of your search to that domain using the site operator. For example, say you want to search for Amazon Alexa content on CNET. Type Amazon Alexa site:cnet.com into the search bar and hit enter. All of the results will be restricted to the CNET domain.
2. Search for a specific word or phrase
Likewise, if you have a specific word or phrase in mind, you can wrap your search query in quotation marks to restrict the results to that exact wording. Searching for Amazon Echo reviews provides around 22.5 million search results, while “Amazon Echo reviews” narrow those results to roughly 91,700 results.
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3. Exclude sites or words
Conversely, place a hyphen before the word or operator to exclude a specific website or phrase from your results, such as Amazon Alexa -site:cnet.com or Amazon Echo review -Dot. This is very helpful when searching for an animal with a car named after it, like a Mustang or JJaguar. Search jaguar -car to get results more related to the animal. This won’t filter every Jaguar (the car) effect, but the animal results will be more prominent. Try stacking the operators, like Jaguar -car -auto, to filter even further.
4. Idioms or phrases can’t fully remember
Suppose you can only remember part of an old saying that your grandmother used to communicate or part of a song lyric; you can use the wild card operator, an asterisk, to fill in the blanks. Search “a * saved is a * earned” or “I don’t want to set the * on fire.” Usually, this can help you find the phrase you were looking for.
5. View a cached version of a site
Not all web pages stay around forever. If something you hoped to return and read has disappeared since you first visited the site or page, you can check to see if Google cached it. However, this operator needs to be used in the address bar, not the search bar—type cache before entering a URL and hit enter. If you’re lucky, Google will have a cached version of the page so you can still view it. Just know the cached version of the page won’t stick around forever.
6. File types
If you’re after a PowerPoint or PDF, you can narrow your results to that specific type of file using the file type operator. To use it, you would want to search something like productivity filetype: pdf or brew coffee filetype: ppt.
