Minimalism - Online Income - ESL - Japan
This is part nine of my Google Speed-Search series. In the last lesson, I gave examples of using Google’s site: syntax. In this lesson, we’re going to have some fun with some really useful search features. Google as a calculator Did you know you can use Google as a calculator? Using either math or plain English, just search with your query, and the Big G will give you the answer! […]
This is part eight of my Google Speed-Search series. In the last lesson, I showed you some of Google’s special syntax. This time, I’ll continue that theme with the site: syntax element. Searching a web site If you know which site you want to search, Google’s site command is a wonderful time saver that often cuts two or three steps out of the search process, helping you find what you […]
Here’s part seven of my Google Speed-Search series. This post looks at how you can use special syntax to finds results based on title, body text or url. Searching only page titles Let’s say you wanted to find profile pages for Michael Jackson. The most relevant will have “Michael Jackson profile” in the title, right? So, try searching with the intitle command: intitle:”michael jackson profile” This will only return web […]
Here’s part six of my Google Speed-Search series. In this lesson, we’ll use wildcards to speed up our searches. A wildcard in Google is represented by an asterisk (*) and used instead of a single word. Consider this search: “Mount Fuji is * high” This phrase search forces Google to return web pages with the exact phrase above, but replacing the wildcard with any word. Here are some examples of […]
Here’s part five of my Google Speed-Search series. This post answers the question, is a Google search case sensitive? What difference does case make? Some search engines will return different results depending on whether you use upper or lower case characters. So, for example, if you type apple you’d get results for the fruit or technology giant. If you typed APPLE however, you’d get results for the Association to Promote and Protect […]
This is the third part in my Google Speed-Search series. Here are the first two parts if you missed them: Google Speed-Search Lesson #1 – Phrase Searches Google Speed-Search Lesson #2 – Boolean Remove unwanted results with negation This lesson introduces negation, i.e. using a minus sign (-) to specify terms you don’t want to appear in your search results. This can be useful when your results are cluttered with unrelated websites. […]
In Google Speed-Search Lesson #1, I showed you how to do phrase searches. In this lesson, we’ll look at basic Boolean, i.e. using uppercase AND and OR in our searches. Let’s imagine you’re British and you want to find websites about Father Christmas, you might start with this: Father Christmas What you’re really telling Google is to search for any website that contains the words Father AND Christmas, not necessarily together, […]
When I was in Secondary school, my math teacher gave us a peculiar exercise for homework. She wanted us to memorize the alphabet backwards before the next lesson. Not surprisingly, when that lesson came, there were only two of us in the class who had actually made the effort to remember our ABCs in reverse order. Thanks to that teacher, I have since been able to fire through a dictionary from either […]