Most people tend to just type what they want into the search box and hit enter. Sometimes if they are super adventurous they might use the ‘+’ parameter but basically that is about it as far as a lot of people’s searching skills go.
Maximising your Google search skills is now becoming a pretty essential research skill, no matter what your domain is – be it academic, industry, or just simply for personal use.
So, let’s get to tips that will help you improve your Google search skills.
#1 Use the tabs to define the search
The first logical tip on the list. You can find the tabs on top of every search. If you want the newest articles, click on News. If you need images, use the Image tab. Tabs will improve your search time by narrowing down the results.
#2 Use quotes and minimise the assumptions
Putting your search parameters in quotes sends the signal to the search engine to look for the whole phrase. For example, if you type Web Development Company, Google will try to find content with those three words in any given order. But, if you type “Web Development Company” it will search for the phrase exactly as you typed it.
#3 Use hyphens to exclude terms
Sometimes you might try to search for a word that has different meanings. Like Jaguar – when you try to look it up you’ll get the results for both the animal and the car. But, if your search query looks like this: jaguar -cars, you will get only animal-related results. Also, using this tip you can exclude a whole domain. If I want to see if my company has been mentioned outside of our website, I’ll type “my domain” -site:mydomain.com.
#4 Search the content of a website with a colon
The website you are trying to find content on doesn’t have a Search bar or it’s not working properly? No problem. Let’s say you are trying to search for Drupal (a content management system) related articles, case studies or anything else on etondigital.com. You just type site:etondigital.com drupal and for this particular query, you’ll get around 162 results in 0,29 seconds.
#5 Search all words in a text block
Use this tip to search the site’s body and ignore titles, URLs and links. Use allintext:frontend conferences 2020 if you to find info about the upcoming frontend conferences in the world.
#6 Search in a title (for one word)
Search for a phrase inside a web page title, and another set elsewhere on the web page. For this, you need to add intitle: into your search query. For example, you are searching conferences in 2020 that have “frontend” in title. Your query would be: conferences 2020 intitle:frontend
#7 Search in a title (for multiple words)
For searching a title for all terms in your search query, use allintitle: before search words. Let’s say you are looking for a list of the best web development agencies in the UK. Your search query would look like this: allintitle:bestwebdevelopment agencies in the UK.
#8 Search within an URL
If you are looking for “Drupal contributed modules” and you want to restrict that search only to pages that have those words in the URL, your search query should be: allintitle:drupal contributed modules.
We hope you enjoyed the article and found these quick tips useful.
