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Google Is A Powerful Tool That No One Knows How To Use Correctly.

Written on Jul 18, 09 7:03 am | Other Technology 5 comments | 0 | 0
* First a disclaimer. I only and only use Google to search the Web, because I simply don't like other search engines.

Yes, it is a fact. Ye Ol' Google is taken way too lightly this days. When people ask you what Google is, you simply say it is a search engine to search the web (assuming you get that question and you don't feel the urge of punching the questioner in the face). Next time you answer to the question "What is google?", make sure you add the word "powerful" - Google is a powerful search engine.

There are two kind of people that don't find their answers using Google: Those who tried but don't know how to use it, and those who ask in and ask their questions in forums or someone else. Many people do use Google and find their answers. Many, MANY people use Google, but they don't know how to unleash its full power, even people who have been used Google for years, including myself, do not know how to unleash all the power Google has. However, in this blog post, I am going to teach you some very basic techniques to use Google like a pro, and trust me, you will have a better chance of finding what you are looking for if you use this methods when you use Google.

But first, some basics.


Alright, many times you google something like this: How to make animations in Photoshop. In Google, you normally are not searching the exact phrase "how to make animations in Photoshop", which is what you normally expect the document to have, but rather, you are searching "keywords" in the pages. Google treats a simple white space as a keyword separator, so you are actually searching this in Google: "how, to, make, animations, in, Photoshop". So the pages you are searching for may or more likely, may NOT have that search phrase in them, but rather, they have those keywords splattered everywhere, like this.
    Hi guys. I currently am a guy who works with animations in this program called Th3 Animatorz. I am currently learning to use Photoshop because I want to make my own animated gifs for simple web pages. But I am very new with this program, and I was wondering, how did you guys learn to use Photoshop?
NOTE: Google tends to omit short words like "to" and "in".

Yes, this why you get pissed off when you can't find your answer Google: You are doing it wrong!. Now that you know that you never search for what you are looking for, Its time for you to learn some pretty Google tricks that are going to increase the chance of them having what you really are looking for.

Now, the techniques.

Exact Word Search.

This is the most important technique you should know. Let me bring the example above again:
    How to make animations in Photoshop
Like (now) you know, searching for that in Google will not bring you the tutorial you are looking for. So you REALLY want to get tutorials to make animations in Photoshop? You know what you want, try luck finding documents that have that exact phrase! But how? It is simple, just add quotation marks to your search queries. So you would have this:
    "How to make animations in Photoshop"
NOW you have a bigger chance of getting what you want! You are telling Google to bring all the pages that have that exact same phrase in them. You can also make a combination of keywords with exact phrases, to search for exact phrases in documents, so you have your search splattered in the page:
    "Within Temptation" Nightwish
The page may have results that are like this one:
    Guys, I am going to buy to the last album released by Within Temptation, yay! I know many of you here prefer Nightwish, but when I saw the album by Within Temptation, I couldn't resist the temptation of buying the album! Deep within, my soul couldn't resist it!
Like you can see, the phrase "Within Temptation" and the word Nightwish is highlighted, however, you also the words "temptation" and "within" that are not highlighted. Why? Simply, because the quotation marks make the whole content inside them to be just one keyboard, so this:
    "Within Temptation", Within, Temptation.
Are three different keywords.

Certain Keywords in documents, but not all of them must appear.


Probably, you have wanted to search for pages that only have certain keyboards in them, but not everything you put in your search query.

For example, suppose you wanted to search in Google for pages that talk about the band Epica or about the band Nightwish, but you don't want pages to talk about both them at the same time. How do you work around this? It's easy. add the word "OR" (with no question marks, and in capital letters) to your queries:
    Epica OR Nightwish
With this, you are saying Google "bring me all the pages that have the word Nightwish and the Word Epica in them. But both words cannot appear in the same page!"

Again, putting various words inside quotation marks make the phrase just one keyword, so if you wanted to search for pages that talk about the band Within Temptation or about Nightwish, you could do this:
    "Within Temptation" OR Nightwish
You know what will happen. However, the pages that talk about Nightwish do not guarantee that you will not see the words Within and Temptation in different parts of the document, but you can have it for sure that google won't show "Within Temptation" in Nightwish pages.

Bring me the words, but make sure I don't see this words in the pages.


I am sure many people have wanted to do searches, but they didn't want to see certain words in their searches. For example, there may be someone that wanted to see horror stories, but the person didn't want to see the word "blood" ANYWHERE in the searches. Yes, you can tell Google that you don't want to see certain words in your searches. That is very easy, just append a "-" symbol before the words you don't want to see. Consider this example:
    "horror stories" -blood
With this, Google knows that you don't like blood so it doesn't show you results that have that word, but it will bring you the "horror stories" results. This technique is very useful. There are people that consider some things to be art, but they don't want to see the explicit part of that art, for example.

You can exclude complete phrases too:
    Nightwish OR Epica -"Within Temptation" -Within -Temptation

Get me wallpapers!


If you are like me, you probably spend too much time looking for wallpapers in Google. You can get wallpapers that are exactly your computer monitor's size, by appending "imagesize:WIDTHxHEIGHT" (no quotation marks) to your searches:
    Anime imagesize:1280x1024
With this (in Google images, must make that clear =P), google will bring you all the images that are 1280x1024 pixels. Very useful for when you want wallpapers, or when you want ANY image in any size. This has been very helpful for me, and it certainly did a very good thing.

---

Those are pretty much the Google techniques I use to get good results to my searches. This techniques can easily be reached in the "Advanced Search" link in Google with a few some options.

Also a little something. Did you know you can tell Google to make your math? I can do this:
    1280 x 1024
And it gives me the result. Its not very helpful, but it is a cool thing Google has. I have also used Google to make some conversions to me:
    20 KB = ? bytes
20 kilobytes = 20 480 bytes

This everything I can tell you about Google. Google is a powerful tool and I honestly think that its use should actually be taught in places where people use computers for whatever reason. Google is used so simply, but no one really knows how to unleash all its power. If you read all this post, you will barely have the chance to say "I tried Google but it didn't help" (I did that myself a few times, but it was because it REALLY didn't help me...). Unless you are like me, you are not very frequently looking for complex things on the internet, and you can find almost everything. Have a good web life (:!
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Comments

  • 0 thumbs!
    Kokoro since Jan 2004 | Jul 18, 09
    We were just talking about this a bit over MSN. It's really interesting how putting the search in quotation marks gives you better results than just searching for something itself. Thanks for the lessons, Vermillion.
  • 0 thumbs!
    The Answer since Feb 2006 | Jul 18, 09
    Hmm, I didn't know about that specific image size search function. Thanks for the tips dude.
  • 0 thumbs!
    Dragoon since Mar 2009 | Jul 19, 09
    I never knew using google could be so complex. *cries*
  • 0 thumbs!
    overKill since Dec 2008 | Jul 22, 09
      Thanks for the post.

  • 0 thumbs!
    Dramon Knight since Jan 2008 | Sep 5, 09
    Thank you, Mr. Google God.

    I seriously wouldn't have ever thought about that though by myself, so thanks.
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