Did You Know?
A few shortcuts in your search queries can save you precious time in your workday.
For example, you can find sites that are similar to the one you are on by adding the operation term related: followed by the website URL. So, if you are reading an article about educational standards in China, you can copy and paste the URL preceded by the related: operator to find other articles on the same subject from various other sources.
Conversely, let’s say you are on a website which has very heavy content like cnn.com and you are looking for something on smartphone sales. Use the Google search box as follows. Type in site:cnn.com smartphone sales to receive search results only within that site. Remember, the top few results will show up with paid ads from any number of other sites. So be sure to look at the results below the horizontal line that separates the paid ads from the actual search results.
The minus sign is often overlooked but could prove very useful. Add this character when you want to narrow your results to become more relevant. For example, you could search the term Vintage Cars. However, adding negative keywords like -Ford -BMW will weed out some results that you may not be interested in combing through.
Use two periods to express a range of dates, prices, or even measurements. Again, this will narrow your results. So, country music stars 1970..1985 would be an example of this.
Should you prefer to limit your search by file type, use the specific file extension. Payroll filetype:xls will give you only spreadsheet results. Any file extension will work. Try PPT, JPG, PDF.
Remember, you never have to use exact spelling, full sentences, punctuation or capitalization in a Google search. Save yourself some keystrokes along the way and keep it to just a few descriptive words.
Find even more search tips like these at www.google.com/insidesearch/tipstricks.