Better Googling

Sorry I'm in Google mode today! Just read a nice article in The McKinsey Quarterly, 'Google like a pro' (not free). I Google a lot and mostly just use the simple term or string search. Occasionally I use more powerful queries. However, in this article I learned some new ones. I thought I'd share them with you (- and by typing them in I'm learning as well!).

  • intitle: "plane crash" > finds the string in the title of a webpage
  • site:nl or site:us for Dutch or US sites only. inurl:news or inurl:forum for news sites and forum discussions respectively. inurl:2008 to limit your search to a time period.
  • view:timeline, gives search results in clickable timeline
  • ~airplane, searches for airplane, plane, air, flight, aircraft, etc.
  • Samuel is a *, gives search results telling you who Samuel is (according to Google...)

I've been using these more often lately. I was thinking: why not put a little cheat sheet on the Google homepage to help users remember?

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Comments

  1. AnonymousFebruary 27, 2009 at 1:02 PM

    Samuel,
    You could try:
    http://www.google.com/help/cheatsheet.html
    http://www.google.com/librariancenter/downloads/Tips_Tricks_85x11.pdf
    http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html
    Or the very exhaustive http://www.googleguide.com/pdf/googleguide.pdf

    Regards,
    Hans (JLO)

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownFebruary 27, 2009 at 1:23 PM

    Thanks Hans! You've learned me a lot of other Google tricks in the past. Thanks for the links!

    ReplyDelete

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