Google is the most widely used search engines. It dominates the market share, with 73% of searches being powered by Google and the rest being shared among Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com, AOL.com, etc. In a world where data and information are currencies, it’s a big convenience to have search engines that help gather answers and resources.
Since we use Google on a daily basis. It should make sense that we know how to use the search function in order to get the best results from the keywords we use, right? Everyone knows how to “Google”. It’s as simple as typing in keywords in the search bar. However, there are ways to optimize Google searches and help us find what we’re looking for even faster. Google has shortcuts that can help you save time and return the most accurate results. This is especially helpful for research and technical writing. Here’s how you can use shortcuts to save time and improve your searches.
Quotation Marks “”
Quotation marks help you search for an exact word, the exact set of words, or exact phrases. This is very useful if you’re searching for book entries, quotes, song lyrics, poems, etc. where you can only remember part of the whole text. For example, a quick search for “master of my fate, captain of my soul” in Google will return the poem Invictus by William Ernest Henley.
Dashes –
Dashes can help you weed out unwanted terms. Think of the dash as a minus sign that will exclude the terms you don’t want to be returned from search results. For example, a list of vitamins-vitamin A will return a list of vitamins without vitamin A in it.
Tilde ~
The tilde is the short squiggly line to the left of the “1” key on your keyboard. Yes, that’s what it’s called. Using it in your search will list out all the similar terms, widen your search and pull out additional results that would normally not be included in search results. It acts as a synonyms searcher. For example, animals~magical will return magical, fantasy, and mythical creatures.
Site
Use this for searching results in sites that have their own search function or to search within a specific website. Best used if you already know the website to look for.
Link: link: query
This search hack can be used to search whatever may be linking to a specified URL. Use it if you’re looking to improve SEO through building links.
Two Periods
Two periods signify a range. It replaces the word “to”. Your Google search will only return results from within the specified range. This works for dates, prices, measurements, etc. For example, AI technology 2018..2019
Rel – related:query
You can use this search hack to search for websites similar to one another.
How about you? Do you know of any useful search hacks to use on Google search? Share them with us in the comments. Remember to stay humble and hustle hard.
Written by Jaie O. The Help