How to Use Google Search Like a Pro!
One day at work, I was in a chat group with the founder of our company, my own supervisor at work and some others. They were talking about a UTM meeting and I jumped right into the conversation and asked for the meaning of UTM. The founder said “Google it”. That was embarrassing for me because right before asking I already googled what UTM meant, but I couldn’t understand why there would be a UTM meeting, and I asked to know if UTM had another meaning apart from the one I saw on the internet. It was that day I learnt another acronym. My supervisor, after seeing what just happened said “You need to have the GIN mentality”. I had to run down to google again to know what the GIN mentality meant, and to confirm whether my supervisor wasn’t offering me an official invite to taking distilled alcohol. Well, I didn’t find the meaning of the acronym online, and to avoid a replay of the first occurrence, I had to ask my supervisor directly what GIN meant. He laughed and said “Google It Now”. That day, something I have always known was reinforced on my heart again; You can google yourself out of trouble.
Story over now! In this post, I will be sharing with you simple tips on how I use Google Search more effectively, and save yourself a lot of stress.
- Every query opens in a new tab: Chances are that you will want to check more than one of the results of a search whenever you run a search. Before now, I would right-click and open a new tab for as many of the pages that I want to check. On days when I’m not so lucky and I get carried away, I click on the first query and I have to go back to the result page if I need to check some others. If this scenario looks familiar, there’s a simple help that Google has offered. In the , you can set every result to open in a new browser tab (the setting calls it browser window) and you never need to right click in Google search again.settings page of Google search
2. Specific file types: I use this mostly when searching for pdfs. By using the filetype operator, I can make my search result to return only a particular kind of file type. So for example I could search for Filetype:pdf Python Programming to limit my result to only pdf files . The kind of result I will get is in the screenshot below. Google has a list of file type that you can use the filetype operator to search for.
3. To strictly search for a specific word or words, use double quotes. For example “Naira Value today”, and only results that are specific to that search will be given.
4. You can use a hyphen to exclude a word from the search result. This comes in handy when you are searching for a word, for example, that is widely and popularly associated with another word , or let’s say brand, you can exclude the association from your search by a hyphen. I did a search on Liverpool and excluded football with a hyphen (Liverpool -football), and it pretty much did exactly what it ought to do.
5. You can search specific sites using Google. By using a colon and the address of the site after your search term, you can limit the results from your Google search to only the site included in your search. This is particularly useful for websites with no search capability but can be used for all sites. For example, if I want to limit my search results to Twitter, I can search like this Don’t leave me site:twitter.com.
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Originally published at https://damilareadekunle.com .
