Are you as clueless as we are in productive searching on Google? Would you like to know a few quick tips for narrowing your search results? As we've said before - anytime we learn something we'll try to share it with you. If you're a Google search master already, share something handy with us in the Comments. If you're not, maybe these brief tips will help save you some time poking around online.
Lets assume you are trying to find our Monday Movie Meme in the blogosphere but you can't remember where we are. All you know is it was something about movies... Putting words in quotes force Google to spit back items with those exact words in them. So if you search for movie meme you'll come up with 6,180,000 results. But if you search for "movie meme" it narrows it down to 25,300!Adding another word outside of the quotes that could narrow down the topic further always helps. You know that this meme of ours is weekly. Although that wouldn't be in the title of our post or blog, by typing "movie meme" weekly your search is lessened to 25,000.Typing the intitle command ahead of your quote search words will pull up only results with those words in the post title. So typing intitle: "movie meme" weekly your search drops down to a mere 1,200!Selecting the Show Options link at the top of the page will allow you to have results shown under only certain parameters of time. By selecting Recent Results under the Any Time section in the left sidebar, you knock it down to 1,100 remaining and they will be sorted by most recent showing first.You can use these search methods for narrowing down any kind of search - for blogs you can't remember exactly, for recipes, for reviews, for JOBS. Try them out today.
6 comments:
I also find that using as many words as possible gets you the page you are wanting more quickly. The average is now four words:
http://www.beussery.com/blog/index.php/2008/02/google-average-number-of-words-per-query-have-increased/
but I tend to use 5 or 6.
You have definitely done your community service for the week! For the month! Helping us manage our money, introducing us to Goodreads, and helping us with Google search tips! I think I learn something every day from you guys! I will definitely put these search hints to good use...
Wow! I really needed this information. Sometimes Google just makes me develop a real potty mouth. I knew there had to be some way of managing the searches. I just couldn't figure out their techy explanations. Thank you so much. Can I adopt you?
I never knew about this "intitle" thing. So helpful! Thank you, Bumbles!!
This is so great to know. As a writer I'm constantly researching.
I use googles as my main search engine but always became either to engrossed or lost in blogsphere.
This tip will surely help me in all my upcoming projects.
This guide helps with more operators used to perform searching. A useful one (IMO) is "-" before a word with exclude that word from the results... while the opposite is true, use a "+" before a work to find results containing that word
http://www.googleguide.com/plus_operator.html
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