Google Usage Tips
Thought I would share a few pointers on google usage. I'm sure that many of you are already aware of most of these search options and features, but I bet even for grizzled internet search veterans, there are a few of these you did not know about. I just recently discovered, myself, that google could serve as a calculator or that it supported wildcard "fill in the blank" searches.
So here, submitted for your perusal, 10 google usage tips — I hope you can put the knowledge to use, to help in your own research and study. For each item, you can click on it to carry out the actual google search operation, and get a hands on feel for how these can aid you. Below each sample query is a short explanation of the provided example.
- "roy shrum"
- If your search query is enclosed in quotes, matches are attempted against the entire phrase. Otherwise, the search terms do not have to be next to each other in the pages being searched.
- vineyard -grape
- Prefix a search term with a '-' character, and pages containing it will be removed from the set of returned search results.
- wiki vineyard church
- Prefixing your search term list with "wiki" will rank Wikipedia articles at the top of the returned search results.
- * is the greatest hockey player ever
- Fill in the blanks! "*" serves as a wildcard character.
- define:exegesis
- Google can do duty as a dictionary.
- 80 * 5.85
- Google is a calculator too. 80 X 5.85 could have been used instead. It can even do exponents — try 10 ** 7.
- 6 teaspoons in tablespoons
- Measurement conversions. Another example — 10 kilometers in miles
- "roberto clemente" 1954..1972
- An example using number ranges.
- "celebrate recovery" site:vineyardnorthphoenix.com
- Confine your search to a given web host. This search will only occur on the set of indexed web pages at vineyardnorthphoenix.com.
- With Google Co-op, you could create your own "custom search engine" by creating a list of web site addresses that you wish to restrain your search to. Here is a custom search engine I started that includes many Vineyard church web sites.
- allinurl:vineyard
- Here, a search for web site addresses that contain the 'vineyard' text chunk.
Happy Googling!