Google Short Cuts and Useful Searches
We use it every day but few of us know that Google search holds many tricks and secrets. These search tricks will help to save you time, make you more productive and help you find what you’re looking for that little bit quicker.
1. Use Google as a timer – Set Google as your own personal timer, choose any combinations of minutes and seconds and Google will let you know once your time’s up. You’ll even get a handy alarm to let you know your time is up.
What to search: “set timer to 5 minutes 0 seconds” or “set timer to 30 seconds” for example (With quotes)
2. Use Google as a currency calculator – Find the current exchange rate for almost any two currencies such as “Euros to Dollars”.
What to search: “Euros to Dollars” – “Pounds to Dollars” (Without quotes)
3. Search up to date results – Omit outdated results by specifying a search date, for example week, month, year.
How to search: Type your search and then click “Search Tools” > “Any Time”.
4. Tired of typing? Speak your search – Use your smartphone, webcam or computers built in microphone to speak your search.
What to search: Visit Google and click the microphone on the right of the search box.
5. Find related websites/businesses – Use Google to help you find sites similar to one another. This query can come in handy for many uses! (Note that this only tends to work with well-established websites.)
What to search: “related:www.exampledomain.com” (Without quotes)
6. Exact match search – Google search not giving you the results you’re looking for? Be more specific with exact match search to find web pages that explicitly mention one or more words.
What to search: “Chinese” “restaurant” “Connecticut”
*TIP* Including two keywords within the same quote will require them to be displayed together, in the same order on any related pages. The above search query allows each keyword to be displayed in any order, anywhere on the site, whether they are next to each other or not.
7. Search for results from a particular website – Place “site:” in front of a domain plus your search term to find results from a specific website.
What to search: “site:kissmetrics.com email marketing”
8. Search for pages which include one of several words – Place an “OR” between two words in a Google search to find results that match either keyword.
What to search: “App Developers Connecticut OR New Jersey” (Without quotes)
9. Search for a business’s social pages – Place the @ symbol before any business name or social page you wish to search for. The resulting pages will display all social sites that the business is registered to.
What to search: @mashable
10. See what’s trending on Google – Find out what people are searching for most within a particular industry or around a particular topic/product. Great for deciding what products to push or what content to market.
What to search: Visit www.google.com/trends
How many of these Google tricks do you use?