Today, the Google search engine has become our main source of information. When we want to find any type of data, the first thing we do is connect to the Internet and go to Google directly, if we do not have it as a home page, which is the most common.
However, finding such information is not as easy as we would like, since there is so much information on the net that it is increasingly necessary to know how to carry out effective searches . In this article we will talk about a series of filters and tricks to search Google and find the content we are chasing faster.
Filters
Just below the search bar (where we write what we want to find), you will see that there are some filters created by Google that can help us narrow our exploration. Depending on what we are looking for, we will click on Images , Videos , Maps (for maps), or More (where we can also filter by -Shopping- stores, books and applications). The last tab, Search tools , will help us define other parameters: the country and the language with which we want the information or search for it in a certain period of time. For example, if we want to search for something very current, we can select in the option “The last 24 hours” or “Last week”.
Tricks and tools
As for other tools, apart from filters, Google also has a symbol system to optimize our searches. We see them below:
– Search for phrases with quotation marks (“…”): When you type a phrase or a set of words in quotation marks, you are indicating to Google that, for the search, only take into account those exact words that are inside the quotation marks, with the same order. It is very useful to narrow the exploration and, above all, to search for textual quotes.
– Specific search within a website: Google allows you to search for a specific word on any web page. We will have to write site: followed by the web that we want to consult (without spaces). As an example, if we want to find the start year of the French Revolution we will write the following:
– Excluding words in a search with the hyphen (-): If you include a minus sign in front of a word, you are indicating that you do not want pages containing that term to appear in the results. With an example it will be better understood: if we want to carry out a search on mice but only want information on those related to computers, we can refine the search by putting the hyphen in front of the word “animals”. Thus, we will not get any results that speak of mice as animals.
– Search pages related to the search topic: If you need a lot of informative resources on a topic and you have found a good page, but you need more sites similar to this one, typing [related: and the web domain] you will be able to get pages from the same theme as the reference page. So:
– Unit conversion and currency conversion: If you need to convert meters to centimeters, or euros to dollars, you can also do it with the Google search engine. You only need to write the metric unit you know and the unit you want to convert it to.
– Google as a calculator: The most popular search engine in the world is also a calculator. You can check it in the following example:
– Know the time and weather: There is always a time or another when we need to know what the weather will be on a certain day or find out what time it is in another country. Google solves it by showing such information about any place on earth by putting only the name of the city and the term “time”, or the name of the city and the term “time”, such as this example:
All these tricks and tools will help us save time and find more accurate information than we are looking for. Making Google searches more efficient enables us not to lose ourselves so much in front of such amount of information that exists on the Internet.
