Searching with Google or any other search engine can be a mighty frustrating experience if you use vague search queries or don’t know a few of the secrets of power searching. Power searching is not limited to geeks, you know. Every one of us uses search engines almost every day. And why not? The answer to any question you have is just a search away. But getting that answer is sometimes not easy. Learning a few power searching techniques can give you an edge, help you get more accurate and relevant results, and save you time.
And lucky for you, if you want to learn more about power searching, there’s a handy PDF cheatsheet for Google that gives you some great tips on power searching. You can print it out and use it for a reference, or if you don’t have a printer, save the PDF to your desktop or documents folder and use it for a reference. And if you’re not a Google fan, you’ll find that many of the tips included in this cheat sheet work in other search engines as wall.
Here’s a little snippet from the Google Quick Reference guide, which we call a cheat sheet:
Power Searching with Google Quick Reference
How Search Works: Google looks for the word you typed in, but sometimes also looks for synonyms or related terms. Any words appearing in boldface type in your search results are terms Google associates with your search terms. Ads appear in response to some queries and are always labeled ads.
Aside from ads, website owners cannot pay to influence the placement of their website in the search results.
Color filtering:
Use color filtering within image search. Click on the appropriate colored box in the left panel (does not work on iPad and Android tablets). Use image search when it appears in search results, and use related image search to refine results. Choose effective keywords: Remember to think about the words you think will be in your desired results page. Determine the most important words in your search as well as potential synonyms.
There’s a whole lot more where that came, and where that came from is:
http://www.powersearchingwithgoogle.com/course/ps/assets/PowerSearchingQuickReference.pdf
Go forth and become a power searcher — because power searching saves you time…and frustration.
Can’t wait to check out this document! Knowledge is POWER!
I did this course a year ago with Google online.
It was fabulous, I did know a few tricks, but as the course went on I realised that I knew very little.
Did you know that the is a digital photo ‘subject ID’? What? If you can’t ID an object submit the photo to the ‘photo search’ and Google will search to identify the object, yes, everything, from birds to engineering components.
If you can do the course, I recommend it.
Hands up to Google again.
See their latest experiment here in Christchurch, New Zealand, yesterday. A balloon flying over the City to give free Internet access to everyone.
I don’t use Google due to their tracking.
I use DuckDuckGo.com and search anonymously. It’s great!