Learn to Google like the pros

Posted by Mark on September 7, 2011 under Computers | Read the First Comment

One handy and simple tool I find myself using often is the “Site” operator in a Google search. Often I find myself needing some info and knowing what site it is on. In those cases I can use Google to help me pinpoint exactly what I want.

Example: Lets say I am doing some product research for a new set of headphones. I know that I really like the reviews at engadget (www.engadget.com). So instead of just Googling “Headphones”, I enter the following in the search bar:

headphones site:engadget.com

This tells Google to only return results from Engadget. Now if you try the above example, you will see that there are a lot of results about headphones supposedly designed by Dr Dre. If I don’t want to wade through those, I simply do this:

headphones site:engadget.com -dre

This effectively tells Google “show me results from Engadget regarding headphones, but remove anything that has “Dre” in it (no offence to the good doctor). We can also stack commands, such as:

headphones site:engadget.com -dre -sony

Or we can add positive operators, such as:

headphones site:engadget.com -dre -sony +noise cancelling

The possibilities are endless. I hope you will find this function as useful as I do. Thanks for stopping by, see you soon.