There’s hardly a day goes by where we won’t ask Google something. Have you ever Googled how to Google? If you haven’t, read on and find some of the top searching tips recently posted to Imgur.
Google Search Operators
These are some basic tricks that will allow you to get the most from your everyday searches.
Search for Exact Terms
By surrounding your search term with quotations (“text here”), Google will only return result which match the contents of the quotations exactly.
Search and Exclude
Many times when you’re searching for something, you’ll find the first page clogged with unrelated terms. Imagine you were researching the Titanic, but didn’t want anything to do with Mr. DiCaprio. Simply pop a minus in beside the terms you want removed from your search results and Google shall deliver.
Search Site
We won’t always begin our search with no idea where to start. If you know which website you want to retrieve info from, you can limit your search to a particular site. The example on the right demonstrates a Google search which crawls through the our site, returning anything with “watch” in the text.
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Search by Filetype
This one’s a biggy for students! There are some cracking PDF files out there which will likely help your research, if only you could bloody find them! Luckily, you can limit your results to show only PDFs. All you need? Add filetype:PDF or replace PDF with PPT for Powerpoints or DOCX for word documents. Stay away from the plagiarism now!
These are some of our favorite search tricks, but by no means all of them! Here’s a really cool infographic that you’ll most likely save somewhere and never look at again. This should be handed to all students on their first day of college – seriously!
