Internet Searching Tips:

More than once I have been extremely frustrated trying to find something on the internet.  Internet searching either gives WAY too much information or info that isn’t relevant. Most of the tips I will share with you I’ve picked up bit by bit.  I’m hoping they will help you.

Exact Match:

When you use quotation marks, you only search for what is inside the quotes.  For example:

Coffeehouses “live music”

will bring up all the coffeehouses that have live music.

Exclusion:

When you use the minus sign, you’ll exclude that information from your search.  For example:

“Scottish Novels: -“Outlander”

will bring up information about many novels that occur in Scotland except the Outlander series.

Wild Card:

When you use the asterisk with another word or phrase, you’ll get lots of different options. For example:

Hollywood *

will provide results like “Hollywood Bowl”, “Hollywood Blacklist”, and “Hollywood movies”.

Specific Web Site:

Do you want to search within a specific web site?  Use “site:website”. For example:

“Jerry Lewis” site:nyt.com

will bring up articles relating to Jerry Lewis on the New York Times site.

More:

Have you used Google’s Search Tabs? Underneath Google’s search bar, there are a number of options. For example:

WEB     NEWS     IMAGES     VIDEOS     BOOKS     MORE     SEARCH TOOLS

News:

If you are looking specifically for a news story that occurred in the last 24 hours,  follow these steps:

• Firstly, Enter your search terms in the search bar.
• Secondly, Click on the News tab.
• Third, Click on the Search Tools Tab
• Last, Click on “Anytime” and select “24 hours” from the drop-down menu

Images:

If you’re looking for an image, enter a description in the search bar and then click on the Images Tab.  If you want to fine-tune your search, then you can add other criteria.  Click on “Search Tools” and then, select the color, type of image, usage rights, etc.

Location:

If you want to find something in a particular location, click on “Search Tools”, then click on “Location”, then type in where you would like to search.  For example:

“Hot Springs” California

will bring up a list of all the hot springs in California.

You can also print out this cheat sheet from Google:

Have you used any of these Internet Searching tips?  Are there other tips you use?  Please share them in the comments below!