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Google is the world’s largest search engine. It is so ubiquitous in our lives that “google” is now a verb in the English language. Yet, many still use only a fraction of Google’s capabilities. From scheduling events in your calendar to creating more exact searches in your browser, Google’s features are huge, its benefits, many. Here are a few to keep your search results optimised.
Search Tabs
When you do a google search, the search engine results pages coughs up a number of options. But right before the results, you will see tabs like All, Images, News, Videos, etc. These are meant to give you versions of your Google search filtered into different categories. So, say you do a search of “website makeovers,” the default result page will show you everything about the keywords. But you can click on videos to see videos related to “website makeovers,” or click on news to read all news related to the search words.
You can also limit your search results to specific periods by clicking on Tools at the top right corner of the search results page. The Settings tab on that page also allows you to fine-tune your results by toggling between safe search, languages, etc. If you did a search recently and want to go back to it, a simple CTRL + H will reveal all the online pages you visited. From there on, you can do a search within search to find your favourite page without much of a hustle.
Simple calculations and Conversions
Google relies on a powerful knowledge graph to provide answers to your searches. When you need to perform a quick mathematical calculation like 333/987, you don’t have to google a calculator first before entering your problem. All you have to do is enter the operation into the search bar and you will receive the answer you need.
Also, simple conversions like metres to miles or currency conversions can be done on Google. The idea is to cut down the processes it takes to get the right answers. Google leverages billions of pieces of information to provide the best results to your searches.
Quotations
Using quotes in your Google search tells the Google bots to look for the words in their exact sequence. Without the quotes, Google will cough up all results containing one or more of the words even if they were not in the right sequence.
Hyphens and colons
Hyphens allow you to exclude certain results in your Google searches. For example, if you typed ‘stallion’ into Google search, you would receive results containing both the animal and the vehicle. If you were looking for only animal results, however, you could type stallion -car, and all results related to cars would be excluded from the search results.
Colons are very effective when you are looking for content on specific websites. This is a handy trick; if you are looking for a specific news topic from a news website, for example, or you don’t want to go through the tedious effort of searching a particular item on any website. Using hosting:sunnewsonline.com, for instance, will provide results for hosting on sunnewsonline.com only.
Linked and similar pages
The more other websites link to another website, the more relevant it is in the eyes of Google. For users, it means more websites trust the information on said website enough to use it as a reference point. This could be a useful vetting tool if you are contemplating using information from online sources. The right syntax is link:sunnewsonline.com. You can go a step further to vet individual pages on the website using the forward slash (/)feature.
And, what if you want to find other websites that offer similar services?