How To Get The Best Out Of Google

By Author: Daniel O`Connor
Total Articles: 14
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Do you know how to use the world's most important search engine? You do? Are you sure about that?

You might be surprised to find out just what it can do. Take out irrelevant results to get just what you're looking for. Find results for specific websites. Remember your bookmarks. Read on!

Exclude Google's Irrelevant Results

Let`s say you`re looking for a recipe to prepare meatballs, but have a tomato intolerance. How do you find what you`re looking for?

1. You can put "meatball recipe" as your search keywords and plough through the results, wasting time with the ones that feature tomatoes. This will give you 56,000 results in Google.

2. Put "meatball recipe" -tomato instead, which will cut out all the more than 13,000 results not relevant to you.

It`s as simple as that. Put a minus sign immediately before the keyword you don`t want to have and the results you get will be exactly what you want.

Focus Your Google Search

You`re looking through a big website with lots of content and want to focus on some specific information. Let`s say you`re looking at the CNN site and want ...
... information on when it`s mentioned the word `copywriter`.

So you go to CNN, put `copywriter` in its search box and click away. What do you get? You get a search that gives you every mention of the word you`re after on the Internet, not just from CNN. That`s no use at all.

Here`s what you do:

Simply enter site:cnn.com copywriter in Google`s search box and you`re there.

It`s that simple. site: & URL (don`t leave a space between the two) and your search keyword/keywords.

Google Bookmarks

When you`re away from home or the office and you want to check on some of your favourite websites - at an Internet cafe, say - it`s a real pain to have to either note them all down on paper or remember them in your head. What if you can`t remember the URLs? What do you do then?

I`m forever checking my work email to see what`s arriving and looking at my web stats to see how many visitors I`m getting. And I'm just the same whenever I'm away from home, too. I'm always heading down to Internet cafes to check on things. I admit it; I'm obsessed.

But I have no problems remembering which websites to look at. Why? Because Google Bookmarks make it easy for me.

If you have the Google Toolbar on your web browser, you`ll know how easy it is to zip to the sites you want to look at most often. But did you know that the bookmarks you have on the toolbar are also saved on a dedicated website? No? Well, they are.

Go to http://www.google.com/bookmarks/ and log in to your Google account.

And hey presto! They`re all there, waiting for you. It took me years to realise the site existed and I literally smacked my forehead when I thought of all the time I`d wasted miserably trying to remember website addresses and typing different combos of `.com`, `.net` and `.co.uk`.

The next time you`re away from your regular computer and need to access the sites that are important to you, remember the time you read this article and mentally thank me!

Googlism

Here`s another time-saving tip that can give you the knowledge you need about something in a split second.

Imagine that you want to find out what people think about something. A person, maybe, or a bit of software. How do you do it? Short of trawling dozens of websites that come up when you enter a search engine request to see what they say, how can you get a super-quick idea of the zeitgeist of the thing you`re researching?

This is how:

http://www.googlism.com/

Check it out. Once you get to the site, put in your search term, click `Googlism!` and see what it gives you.

Word of warning: be prepared! Not every result you see will be necessarily what you are after. But it will capture the essential `story` - the way people view something. Here are a few of the results for the search term `Gordon Brown` (the UK Prime Minister):

- gordon brown is an enigma to his colleagues
- gordon brown is worried that the ecb only needs to take action when inflation is too high
- gordon brown is a high taxing chancellor
- gordon brown is by far the most influential member of britain`s labour government
- gordon brown is preparing to throw his weight behind the campaign for british membership of the euro

Granted, what it gives you isn`t the most up-to-date of information, but hey, it`s a start. Why not give it a test run?