Google Like a Professional
1. Exact Search – Put your search term in quotes when you want specific words or a phrase to show up in the results. If you type “your question goes here” in quotes, Google will do a deep search and show you results with pages that contain exactly those words in that order. It’s super handy when you really want to find information with those exact terms in it.
2. Similar or Related Search – There are 2 kinds of similar/related search, you can use the tilde (~) or use the word Related. If you use the ~ you need to put it after your search term or phrase. For example if you want to search for pizza places with draft beer or something similar you’d enter: ‘pizza places with draft beer~’ Google will return something like search results for places with draft beer (and search results for places with craft beer.) The second related search option is to use the word related before your search term. So using the last example it would be related: pizza places with draft beer. The google results would again return the craft beer and draft beer results.
3. To find search results with two specific terms together, use the word AND between them. For example searching for ‘Gluten-free AND pet-friendly restaurant’ will only return search results that have both Gluten-free and pet-friendly in them. You can also do a sort of opposite effect with the OR function. Putting in OR between two search terms will leave you with results that have one or the other search term in them, or both.
4. Exclude a term from your search results with a (-). Maybe you want an Italian creme cake recipe with no coconut in it. Your input would be: ‘Italian cream cake recipe -coconut’
5. The (*) wildcard is to help fill in missing words in your search, or help you come up with ideas. For example ‘The * of war’ will return all kinds of things it could be: the art of war, the book of war, the spectre of war etc.
6. Search for a specific filetype using ‘search term filetype:pdf’ for example of you want google to only return pdfs in the results. If you only want images you’d put jpg at the end instead, or if you want videos you might put MP4 etc.
7. Search only within a specific website by entering ‘site:website search term’. For example if you’re looking for my budgeting article you’d enter site:wecanadult.com budget