Google is ubiquitous. I still remember the day when I first searched on Google. It was in it's infancy and what grabbed my attention was it's simplicity and faster search results. Before Google, I was engaged with Altavista. Altavista had that huge directory like yellow/brownish interface and It was quite an overwhelming for starter where to start and search. Today, when we mean searching something online, Google has become the standard for searching. Though it looks so simple and vulnerable, overtime, it has grown to become as huge as 'kragen', it's tentacles have reached to that extent that to reach there, We've to furnish our searching skill even more.
I still consider myself not an advanced searcher but I don't hesitate calling myself beyond the normal searcher.
I've seen people searching on google with simple keywords. Most of young people search internet for music and if they want some bands mp3 to download, what they do typically is
for ex: "rolling stones mp3 download" and hit Search on google.
If you want to find biography of some great legendary figure, normally, they just enter something like "Elvis Presley Biography" and search.
There are many examples of simple search keywords which people use.
I'm not telling that this is not a proper way of searching but definitely It's not a smart way to search. Somehow you may get to the page you've searched for but after investing your precious times. Smart searching reduces the time taken and I'm going to tell what I know about google searching.
When I came here in USA, my usual search was like this:
"1 gallon in litre"(without quotes) and hit Search button on google.
My father's car gulped 13 gallon at one go and being Nepalese,
I calculated it again as
"13 gallons in litre"(without quotes) and hit search button on google.
Similarly, people were using pounds here as for measuring weights. For starter, if they want to know, try this:
"1 pound in kilogram"(without quotes) and hit search button on google.
I weighed 74 kilograms and to find my pound value, I typed:
"74 kilograms in pound"(without quotes) and hit search button on google.
How about some mile conversion to kilometers? Starter can use this way:
"1 mile in kilometer"(without quotes) and hit search button on google.
One day, we drove to San Francisco and my father told me it is some 200 miles far from our place. So, I typed on google how many kilometers we traveled:
"200 miles in kilometer"(without quotes) and hit search button on google.
That's it and google gave me all answers at just one go. I think these are the things we learned in school but you should try it in Google. I call it smart search and If you are wondering what is this all about, it's google's Calculator. And, hey if you want to customize such conversions with your own units, DID YOU NOTICE that 'IN' like "1 pound in kilogram". So, don't miss that IN and you'll get mathematical conversion easily.
In addition to that, if you know this following mathematical operator as:
+
-
*
/
then, you can get calculation easily too. for eg:
4*4 and hit search button on google. Try some more using above operators. Wow, it's google's calculater. I bet most of you didn't know this before.
If you know trigonometry, you can use it get the result for some complex formula. Since I'm not so well versed in trigonometry, I dare not describe that here.
Okay, Now, I'll tell you how to effectively search some practical things online. When you search online, don't get easily disappointed with the results. It's because of the keywords you searched for. So, just even a simple word or letter counts while searching.
I was searching for a picture of Moon which my father showed me in real life. The only thing I knew about the picture is that it's taken from Alaska and that's how it looked from Alaska. At first, I didn't believe but I tried following keywords,
"moon view from Alaska"(without keywords) and clicked the Images tab on Google's search engine. All I found were regular normal sized moon pictures. Pronto, I started playing with different keywords like:
"moon from Alaska"(without quotes) on Image search and I saw queer thumbnail of the same moon photo on first result of the page.
I removed the search keyword 'view' from above because, 'View' as a search keyword is very common word and to narrow my search and to get precise result, I removed that and I got my expected result at one go. Basically, when we search online, we've to take care of these things and remove unnecessary common words from the keywords apart from the one we're searching for. I couldn't delete 'moon' because, that's what I was searching for and I could've included 'moon picture from Alaska' or 'moon photo from alaska' but as I wrote earlier, 'Photo' and 'picture' they were again so common words not good for precise and quick result.
I quickly used the same keywords("moon from alaska") to find some information on WEB(not image). Well, there wasn't any relevant informations on it. I again played with keywords, used little bit of common sense( I knew Alaska is somewhere near North Pole) and this time I entered:
"moon from North pole"
Voila, there was the first page which had the exact information I was looking for. That's How I did, Ametya Ji.
Now, to get little on advance level, if you are searching some information from a particlue site, remember this keyword:
"site:"(without keywords)
suppose I want so search some informations from my own blog, like about games. so my keyword would be:
"game site:meroguff.com"(without quotes) and hit the search button on google.
That's it, you'll get all the results only from meroguff.com highlighting the searched phrase or keyword 'game'. Just remember this ,"site:"(without quotes) keyword to use. You could ask me why not go to site itself and use it's search bar, it's again same thing, being smart. You could choose long cut or short cut. I like short cut. If you are wondering how google knows all about my/your blogs and sites, because, google's search spiders crawl your sites and blogs all the time at definite period of time. And, they've records or snapshots of your site's data. You don't believe me?? here's how:
use this following keywords:
cache:www.somedeadsites.com
what this "cache:" does is that It keeps the snapshots of websites periodically. If you see some sites dead or not opening recently, just use "cache:www.somedeadsite.com" and you shall see that site still opening. But these days, google seems keeping records of only 3 days old records.
Now, to search or get definition of some keywords, you may want to use search keywords followed by a word called "define".
It's just like asking search genie your questions:
Try this:
"define love"(without quotes) and hit search button on google.
You could just use 'love' as your search keyword but the results would be vague again, as I wrote before. If some keywords are popular enough, you don't need to worry about because, most of the online encyclopedias like wikipedia would store them on their database.
Search this:
"Prashant Tamang"(without quotes) and hit search buttong on google.
What do you see is the first result stored by wikipedia. So, normally, if you are seeking for some information which are quite popular would be stored by sites like wikipedia but what if the search keywords are not that popular. You still can force it to search if it's there in Wiki or not just by using following keywords:
"keywords" +wiki
Did you notice "+wiki"?? that plus sign will tell google to include sites with 'wiki' word.
From above example, if you don't want to see information from wiki but from some other sites, use the following keywords:
"Prashant Tamang -wiki"(without quotes) and hit search button on google.
So, this '+' and '-' here are not mathematical operators but are used to include or omit the search results relevant to those searched keywords.
Eg: Apple (search for keyword 'apple' on google). What do you see? it's just Apple computers official site at first link, right?
Now, try this
"Apple +fruit -computer"(without quotes) and hit search button on google
This will only show the result relating to fruit but omitting all the results which are related to computers. So, this is smart search, I call. You could use and try that '+' and '-' for other different purpose. Just try it.
Now more advanced and somewhat unethical searching. It's like Get what you want. Are you searching for some ebooks online??
For example, if I'm in need of some ebooks based on visual basic, I would use following keywords.
intitle:"index of" "visual basic" ebook
intitle:"index of" - will fetch the sites with the title 'index of' and why we are using this because, most of the web sites are structured that way. Index will show the directory contents most of the time. So, this intitle:"index of" will give you the precise results for downloads of anything. Here you could use the title of the book most of the time, or you can try with authors name too. Just try and experiment.
And, to search music:
intitle:"index of music" "elvis presley"
or
intitle:"index of mp3" "elvis presley"
or
intitle:"index of music" "elvis presley" mp3
Don't use some thing like "elvis presley song" etc. Just narrow your site and you'll get what you want shortly.
I don't know if I should be writing this following keywords or not, but, I'm just letting you know these things are the black art of searching things online. If you are searching for some softwares, use following keywords
"(Name of the software) +softwarez +blog"(without quotes) and hit enter on search button of google
These are the keywords, I just discovered myself and I'm not telling anything more than that :)
Hope you had wonderful learning
and thanks for reading.
If you've any questions, let me know :)
Related:
You may also like to use this simple tool called Google Hacks if you hate remembering all those Google commands
Read more It's Interesting!
