The English language is weird. We use “football” to describe a game played mostly with hands. It’s called a “driveway”, but all we do is park there. And “Google” can be a noun and a verb.
To “Google something” means using the Google search engine to find information. To find information quickly and easily, it helps to know some tricks.
So hop in my digital car, and I’ll drive you over to www.google.com.
You’ll see a simple interface: The Google logo and links leading to different search types and other tools. Your cursor will appear in the search box.
Typing a search term in this box and pressing enter tells Google to return Web pages containing all the words you typed in, as well as common variations on the words. Case doesn’t matter, and Google will often find and offer spelling, tense and grammar corrections.
Using special symbols helps us get even better results. The text below illustrates this by using examples you can try yourself. My examples will use single quotes like: ‘this’
When using Google, don’t type the single quotes, just the words they contain.
Required words
The plus sign denotes required words in your search term. If we search for ‘stephen king it review’, searching for reviews of Mr. King’s book or movie “It”, we won’t get very good results, since “it” is such a common word. However, we can make the word “it” required by putting a plus sign in front of it: ‘stephen king +it review’. Much better – the first two links on the resulting list contain the reviews we need.
Excluded words
The minus sign excludes words from appearing in your results. If we want to find pages dealing with Mark Twain’s history, quotations and movies, but we don’t care to see anything related to his books, use: ‘mark twain –books’
Phrase search
Using double quotes will find links containing an exact phrase. ‘second city of michigan’ will return many unrelated pages. Putting double quotes around that term gives us links to what’s been frequently called the “second city of Michigan”, Grand Rapids.
Use these techniques to search for generic information on google.com or for more specific information on their specialty sites:
froogle.google.com – Find items in online stores. See pictures of your items and sort by price.
www.google.com/imghp – Look for pictures. Searching for ‘cute puppies’ gives you some adorable examples.
local.google.com – Give a topic and zip code to see all nearby stores dealing with that topic. Visit those hard to find sushi restaurants or stores selling used and rare books.
directory.google.com – If you’re not sure which search words to use, the Google Web Directory is a good place to start. You can sort information by common topics and subtopics (like arts, business, computers and games), and search within those topics.
Google’s publicly stated mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. They’ve given us the tools. All that’s left is to practice.
Read more about Google searches.
Readers Respond
John helps out:
“Good information, but you neglected to mention one of my favorite features of Google – the “define:” function. If, during a web-surfing session, you run across a word that you don’t know the meaning of, all you have to do is open Google in a separate browser window and type “define:” (without the quotes) and your word. Google usually returns definitions from several sources. I find it especially helpful when my kids are doing their homework online.”