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| Dahlström, Håkan. (2010). I've gone Google. Retrieved from http://www.fotopedia.com/items/flickr-4473305401. Creative Commons. |
Lesson 1 alone teaches users how to filter image results by colour, explains how Google search actually works (including how it prioritizes Web pages), outlines what special characters can/can't be used in Google searches, emphasizes the importance of word order, and offers instructions for finding specific words in a Web page.
According to Google engineers, knowing how to find a specific word in a Web page puts you in the top 10% of Google users. Top 10%! (woohoo!)
To pinpoint some of the highlights (and--who am I kidding--to meet the requirements of an assignment), I'll share a few search tips with you.
Basics
The first is pretty basic. To search for an exact word, you type the word into the search box and hit enter. To explore somewhat further and widen the scope of your results, you might also try synonyms of the word, particularly those that carry the tone or context that you hope to explore. At one time, you could also search all available synonyms of a word by putting a tilde (~) in front of your search term. Google, however, discontinued this operator in 2013. There are, however, many synonym finders online that can help you figure out alternative ways to research a given term. If your search would be better served by an entire phrase, putting quotes around the phrase will cause Google to search for the entire phrase (as a unit) rather than all the individual words that make up the phrase.
It gets better. Once you get to a specific site, you can even search for exact words or phrases within the site by pulling up the "find" search box by using ctrl and F (control-F for PC) or command-F (Mac). The finder then lets you advance (by clicking on an arrow) through all the instances of the word found in the specific site that you are in.
Shortcuts
Google also has a number of shortcuts that can be activated to execute popular searches, such as weather, definitions, units of measurement, etc. (see Everyday Essentials). For example, if you include the word define before a term or a phrase, Google will supply a dictionary definition.
If you're looking for a specific product available within a specific price range, you can combine an exact term or phrase with the price range of your choice to find the specific product available in a specific price range. For example, if I wanted to look for Lip Smackers lip balm online for my daughter, I could simply combine the phrase lip smacker with my price range (of $1.00 to $3.00) like this: "lip smacker" $1.00..$3.00. Google will recognize the dollar sign, and using two periods between my upper and lower prices will pull up sites with the phrase lip smacker available for $1.00-$3.00. Alternatively, I could use the "gear" icon (which appears at the upper right of the screen following a search), open up an advanced search, and specify the dollar sign and numbers there to limit my search.
Another handy shortcut is conversion of units. For example, if I want to convert pounds to kilograms, I would simply type something like 141 pounds to kg, to discover that 141 pounds is just shy of 64 kg. Some unit conversions are a bit more complex, such as figuring out how many Egyptian pounds I could get for $20 Canadian dollars. In this case, searching $20 dollars to pounds defaults to American dollars and British pounds, but drop-down menus in the default solution allow me to specify Canadian dollars and Egyptian pounds, whereby I learn that $20 Canadian dollars is equal to $129.25 Egyptian pounds. (Good to know.)
If I want to call one of my Dutch cousins in the Netherlands, Google can also help me figure out a reasonable time to call. For example, I can simply search by inserting the word time in front of a country (Netherlands), to discover that at 2:00 p.m. in Alberta, it's 10:00 p.m. in the Netherlands.
Operators
I can also use operators to limit my search to specific sites and specific filetypes, or I can include or ignore certain words in my search. For example, if I want to search for a specific file type, such as PDF files or JPG files, I can simply use the filetype operator (filetype:[no space--specify file extension]) with my search term to limit the results to a specific file type. For example, if I only wanted to look for JPG files based on the search term basketball, I would use the following search: basketball filetype:jpg (or filetype:jpg basketball--the search term can appear before or after the operator). If I wanted to make sure that my search results included results specific to university basketball I would include the operator intext: and the word university in my search query, like this: basketball intext:university. On the other hand, if I wanted to eliminate the word university from my results on basketball, I would use the minus operator (hyphen), like this: basketball -university (note: the space between the term and the operator is important).
Related Searches
To find pages related to my search topic, I can simply scroll down after performing a search, and Google will supply a number of related searches. I may discover that a related search gets me closer to my desired information or gives my a different search angle, each of which can be useful in research.
Conclusion
A beautiful feature of Google is that there are many ways to discover the same information; you can search different media, translate to and from different languages, and use any combination of search terms. However, learning specific Google syntax allows you to enter the most concise query possible to find credible resources on what you're looking for. This is a valuable time-saving technique, and it will also make you a more effective professional or researcher.
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