DHAKA: Google throws millions of dollars and hundreds of PhDs into making its search engine easier to use. And it’s important that they do, because most of us treat it like a sentient oracle rather than bothering to carefully craft our queries: “Where’s the best pizza in Camden? Who was the US President during the Cuban missile crisis? Who wrote the book that Blade Runner is based on?”
It’s the world’s default search engine simply because it works well even when we use it incorrectly, reports The Telegraph.
But, according to the report, by giving Google some logical instruction we can dig out more focused information from the huge cloud of data that is the internet. There are several tricks you can use to refine your results. Here are some of the best.
Removing clutter
Imagine you’re looking for websites about Norwich - perhaps you’re planning a trip - but pages about Norwich City Football Club are cluttering your results. You can tell Google what you’re not looking for, just as much as what you are, with a minus symbol. So if you want Norwich information but aren’t interested in football:
Norwich -football
Similarly, if you want to find mentions of the word inception, but none related to the Leonardo DiCaprio film:
Inception -film
Exact phrases
You can also look for an exact phrase, perhaps a quote from a book or a person's phone number, by placing speech marks around it:
"To be or not to be"
The opposite of this is sometimes also true: rather than an exact phrase, you may want to search for all words which have a similar meaning. Place a ~ before a word to also search for synonyms.
Specific websites
Speech marks help you to find a specific phrase anywhere on the internet, but what if you want to search for something vague in a specific place? You can easily limit your search results to pages from a single website:
site:telegraph.co.uk iphone review
Many of these features - but not all - can be used via a simple user interface via Google's advanced search page.
Geography
Sometimes the global nature of the internet can get in the way. Imagine you want to read reviews of local pubs. Searching for "The King's Head" is going to be tricky as there are hundreds, but we can use the "location" tag to narrow down our results.
The King's Head location:Norwich
Missing words
If you're looking for a certain something, but can't remember part of it, you can substitute a *. For instance, you want to search for quotations of Martin Luther King's famous speech on civil rights, but his immortal line partially escapes you. Searching for:
"I have a * that my four little children will one day live"
Will bring up results just as this would:
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live"
Find similar sites
Found a useful website, and want to track down others that are similar? Google has a feature for that:
[related:nameofwebsite.com]
What's this image?
If you have an image but don't know its source, you can drag-and-drop it onto the search box in Google's Image Search. The results will then show all websites which use the same - or similar - images.
This feature has even been used in the past to identify mystery objects: snap a photo on a plain background, and a search will reveal similar images - the context will explain what it is.
BDST: 1925 HRS, FEB 11, 2015
