are you using Google to its full potential?

Maybe you are aware of this already, but I just thought I would mention it.

When you search, don't only search the obvious parrot style sentences, but also some more original wording, sentences that you would use when talking to a friend.

Also you can change the position of the words and see the results change accordingly.

If you need to highlight those words that you searched in your findings,
you have to open the CACHE page (not all sites have it but many have it).
You hover your mouse over the result and up comes a double arrow.
Click on the arrow and click on "CACHED".

Also you can use the facilities on the left of the page such as to find only videos with that wording, only discussions (forums would mainly be in this section), only blogs (you select MORE and BLOG)....

You can change location, have it set on UK: Google knows your IP number and can see where the computer is and send you the results accordingly.
Other than that it would automatically set you on USA results.

See those sites where content has been added in the last 24 hours (more search tool) which tells you the website is still looked after...

Not to forget the Google tools icon within the page top right.

 

Thanks for that, MF, all my computer knowledge has come from just playing around with it, so it is really useful to get tips from other people.

 

Does anyone use the full potential of anything? I'm still trying to get my head around this

Techniques for using Boolean logic to search the Internet. ... Boolean logic allows you to combine words and phrases into search statements to retrieve ...

Cheers, Tony.

 

While we're on the subject of google tips, you might sometimes want to use all of google's leading edge search facility to find content on one specific website. Then you can say things like

 

A few more Google tips:

• Put "quotation marks" around a phrase to search specifically for that. Example: you want to specifically find something about "time machines" and not get results back for pages that happen to have those 2 words in but several paragraphs apart!
• Use a minus (-) sign in from of a word to exclude that from the results. Example: you want to to find time machines that are not the Dr's Tardis: "time machines" -tardis

More can be found here!: http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=136861

 

Sometimes using a deliberate misspelling will throw up a load more results, mackeral (4,270,000 results) in lieu of mackerel (13,800,000 results) for example (you'd be amazed how many fishermen can't spell the names of the fish they catch - possibly over 4 million).