Google Search Tips (ver 1.0)

Google has become an integral part of our online life. Oxford even added Google as a verb in its English Dictionary. Its web search capabilities are quite powerful and save us a lot of time in finding the right information on the web.

Here I would like to illustrate some important Google Search tips and techniques that are quite useful in day to day life.

• Note that your searches on Google are NOT case-sensitive. So a search on MalDivEs gives the same results as searching on maldives.

• It is always recommended to use more than one search term (or keyword) and those terms specific to the topic of interest for better results. For example, a search on maldives hotels yields better results than just searching on maldives to find hotels details in the beautiful islands.

• Google ignores some common words and single characters (like why, if, of, a, i etc.) from the search terms to improve the search quality. You can easily identify the terms ignored by Google from the blue bar above your search results.

• By default Google assumes AND operator between your search terms. It means that Google tries to display results that have all the search words you used. You can force Google to use OR logic by including OR (in upper case) between search terms. This will show results matching at least one of the search terms.

• There is a way to tell Google that you would like to see results that contain some word or character as a much by preceding the term with a + (plus) sign. In the same way you can precede the search term with a - (minus) sign to tell Google to NOT TO show results having that search term.
  

• In real scenarios a combination of these two search operators proves to be more useful. A perfect example is searching for news and information about Titanic Ship while ignoring results containing the reference to the movie or music. In this case the search string would be +titanic -movie -music.
  

• Also, you can force Google to do a phrase search which means that the entire search string becomes one search term. To do this enclose the complete search string inside a pair of " (double quotes). When you make a search with terms i wish if i could there are very less chances of seeing more results showing the phrase as it is. Same works like a charm when you search the phrase surrounded by double quotes "i wish if i could".

So far we discussed various possible simple search methods in Google to achieve targeted results. Note that you are not limited to any one of these methods of search. The best results are always possible when you combine more than one method!

We will discuss other interesting Google Search Tips in coming days.