Google is the most popular search engine.
You don’t need to be a genius to work that out. But sometimes actually getting the search results that you’re after can be a very difficult process. Especially when a single search can bring up millions and millions of results. Google knows that using a search engine can often be difficult so they created a handful of ‘search secrets’, designed purely to help (and entertain) your Google search.
1. Search Specific
You can make your search more specific simply by adding a set of quotation marks. This will make google search for your phrase typed exactly as it was searched.
So, searching “bespoke software Telford” will show us more relevant results than if bespoke software Telford was searched.
When you make a multiple worded search, Google searches the web for each term individually and pulls all of the results together. This can produce a list of meaningless search results with web pages containing maybe only a single word of the phrase you originally searched.
2. Remove Unwanted Search Results
Sometimes, life requires you to search for terms which can often have two meanings. There’s nothing more annoying when you’re trying to find some in-depth information about the new movie ‘Glass’ but being greeted by nothing but companies that sell and fit glass windows!
This handy Google trick lets you filter out the results you don’t want to appear simply by using a hyphen. So, for example searching: glass -material will filter out the window services and similarly glass -movie will remove any results referring to the upcoming box office hit.
3. What’s That Word Again?
As humans we’re all prone to experiencing moments of mind blank, especially not helpful when you’re making a specific Google search. If that happens simply let Google fill in the blanks for you using the search trick of adding an asterisk.
You’re looking for bespoke software development in Telford but just at the moment of typing in your search, your mind goes blank and you can’t remember a word. Simply searching “bespoke software * Telford” will tell Google that there should be another word in place of the asterisk and alter the search accordingly showing you results had the word ‘development’ been included.
4. Find a Document
You know what you’re looking for. You know that it’s on the web as a PDF. Finding it is going to be like finding a needle in a haystack, right?
Wrong.
Using this trick, you can tell Google that you want the results to be in only a specific file format. For example, mobile app development filetype:PDF shows results of all PDF files that relate to mobile app development.
5. Reverse Image Search
This is the most well-known Google search trick but it can be far too useful to leave out. A reverse image search is using an image as the search ‘term’ instead of using text.
To use the reverse image search head to the Google image search page and instead of typing in the box select the camera icon on the right. Simply paste in a URL of an image on the web or even upload an image you have saved and search. Google will then attempt to tell you what the image is, show you visually similar images and even show you web pages that contain the same image.
6. The Word Tool
A Google search has the handy added extra of being a spell checker, a dictionary and a thesaurus – if you know how to use it. If you want to check a spelling of a word simply type it into Google. That’s it.
If you have spelt it wrong, Google will correct it and search and provide results based on the correction. Getting a dictionary definition of the word is as simple as adding the word ‘Define’ at the start of the search, this is the trick to getting yourself a whole bunch of synonyms too.
Using the define trick you can even go as far as finding antonyms, the origin of the word, a visual on word use and even ask for a translation into another language.
7. Are There Any Others Like That?
So, you’ve found a really interesting website and you want to see if there are others just like that one but what do you search for? ‘websites like….’ Will get you nowhere with limited and often unrelated results.
Instead ask Google for a related search using related:roundsoftware. Your results will be similar or directly related to what you have asked for.
8.What’s the Weather Like In…
If you’re planning to travel this trick can be extremely useful – it can also be useful even if you’re not planning to travel and purely just want to discover. You can find out the current (and future) weather anywhere, yes anywhere.
All you need to do is Google search the word weather followed by a postcode/town/city and Google will show you the current weather for that area. Not only that but there will be a breakdown of the weather for the day and even a look into the weather and temperature expected for the coming week.
9. Flip a Coin
In today’s ever-growing cashless society very few people are carrying coins. This means in times of intense decision making, not having a coin can make things difficult. All you need to do is to Google ‘Flip a Coin’. This feature within Google’s search literally flips a coin for you.
There’s even a little animation of the coin being flipped before it provides you with the result of the flip.
10. Atari Breakout
If you fancy a quick time-out with a classic arcade game, you can do this right within your Google search.
Simply type ‘Atari Breakout’ in the search box and click ‘Images’.
The game will automatically load for you to play – even using the image results as the bricks!