By Alex Omenye
One of the reasons that Google may not find you the right answers to what you’re looking for is probably because of the way you have been searching on the search engine.
We might have heard statements like, ‘Google knows everything until it’s time to do assignments’, leaving us searching through every word that comes to mind without favourable responses.
However, in this article, we show you the ten effective ways you can get the best results from Google.
“Quotation marks”
Quote marks are one of the best ways to get accurate search results on Google. All you need to do is place quotation marks around the terms you’re looking for. For example: “health studies.” What this does is that your search will have everything that has the term “business studies.” It would exclude searches with individual terms like “business” or “studies.”
Dashes –
When you include a hyphen (-) before a term in your Google search results, Google will not show you results that are related to the term you’re searching for. Example: “cars-house” will only include the cars — and not houses named cars.
Tilde ~
This is used to show you a string of results that are related to each other. This will tell Google that you’re looking for synonyms of the term. For example, travel ~ tourism will show you results like travel items, places to go to, and everything related to travel and tourism.
Site:
This is a hack. It gives you search results within a specific site. To do this, you type site: followed by the name of the website you want to search. “site: gadgetsafrica.com best laptops to buy.”
Searching for multiple words at once
You can search for multiple terms on Google and this can help in narrowing down your search to help you find what you want. Example: “Best ways to pass an exam” OR “How to pass your exam with A+” Both searches would be done and you then choose which you want to go with.
Use the most important words
This is necessary because searching for too many words may limit your search results. Hence, it’s important to use the most appropriate words or terms. For example:
Don’t search “where can I find a delicious shawarma spot,” but instead search: for “shawarma spots nearby.”
This would help Google get you the info you need quickly.
Searching for a range of numbers
When you use two dots and a number, you signal to Google that you’re looking for a specific range of numbers. Numbers that aren’t in that scope wouldn’t appear in your search. For example: Which team won the Qatar ..2022 world cup
In the above example, Google knows that you don’t need anything before or after 2022. This hack helps narrow down your searches to a specific number to improve your googling experience.
Filetype:
This search hack allows you to filter your search. For instance, by typing “Nigeria filetype:pdf” your Google would be filtered and unnecessary info would be filtered out. This search will only show you PDF documents related to Nigeria.
Command + F or Control + F keyboard shortcuts
If you are searching for anything on your PC, Command + F for Mac users and Control + F for Windows users are keyboard shortcuts you can use to find a particular term on a web page quickly. It saves you time and energy.
Asterisk *
Adding an asterisk in your search allows Google to act as a wildcard search operator and fill in the blanks, however, you still have to filter through the results provided by Google until you find the result you need.
These are hacks that would improve your googling experience once you start making use of them.
Let us know the ones you have been using before now in the comments section.