4 Hacks To Get The Most Out Of Google

We have all Googled different terms and phrases on the very popular search engine, but are we getting the most out of Google? Here are 4 hacks that help us in finding what we are actually looking for.

• Putting exact phrases in quotes: Google, by default, assumes what we enter in the search bar are keywords and tries to find websites which contain these keywords irrespective of the order. If you are looking for a certain phrase or group of words in a particular order, consider putting them in quotes. For example, if you wanted to search for a blog titled ‘cars and me’, you would search for “cars and me”. Without the quotes, this blog doesn’t even show up on the first page of the results.

• Using the Hyphen to remove some results: Let’s say you were looking for different types of roses, or wanted a good image of roses. By typing roses on the Google search bar, you’d be surprised to see most of the results showing the name of a song instead. Now, by typing roses -song, you are asking google to display results which contain ‘roses’ but don’t contain the word ‘song’. This way the hyphen can be used to remove results with a certain word from showing up.

• Getting around with the asterisk: If you are not sure of a certain word, you can ask google to fill up that blank with any word possible by using the asterisk symbol (*). For example, typing It’s * or never in Google, you would get results matching the Elvis Presley song ‘It’s now or never’. Google searches through most words and finds the word which makes the phrase provide a large number of results. If you scroll through the results, you’ll even come across a page saying ‘It’s meow or never’. That’s acceptable too since you’ve asked Google to fill the blank with any word.

• The OR option: You can use the OR option just as in programming languages. For example, by typing in internships OR jobs you will get websites which may show up only internships or websites which focus only on jobs. Typing internships jobs instead would result in websites which contain both these terms.

Apart from these tips, don’t forget the ‘tools’ option or the ‘advanced search option’ under settings. This is accessible from the toolbar just below the search bar and above your results. These options can help you further refine your search.

~ Sukumar