You do not know how to Google

When you started to use the internet google search is probably the first thing you learned. What is it to learn about a super simple website with only one input box to enter your query and a search button to find any information you may want? Everyone knows how to Google, but very few know how to search on google efficiently and get the results quicker.

Google is capable of much more than simple keyword searches. Once you know how to use google efficiently you will be able to find the results you want, a lot faster and save a bunch of time.

Test yourself

Let’s do a small exercise to test how much you know and if reading this article is worth your time or not. I want you to do a simple search for me about coronavirus. I do have certain specific requirements about the type of results I want, which are as follows:

• You must perform just one query to fulfill all the requirements
• I want the results to have only pdf files (.pdf file extension)
• I want the results to be authentic, so they must all be from a government website (.gov.in domain)
• I don’t want to include the pages that use the word china anywhere in the post body
• I want only those results that the word Novel in the result title
• I don’t want the results to have the word Health in the result title
• I want only those results that were added between the year 2021 and 2022

Take your time to make a search query that fulfills all the above requirements. If you managed to do so, you are already a pro google searcher. Stop reading, this article is going to be a waste of your time. But if your results are not marked all the requirements or if you struggled a lot to reach the final result, continue reading and we will fix that together. One step at a time.

Learning time

Google has many simple search operators to help you search precisely what you want faster, filtering out all non-relevant results. If you tried the above exercise your first query might have looked like this

coronavirus

Let’s learn some of the google search operators and improve our results.

filetype:

You can restrict the results to be of specific file types, it can be a Word document, PDF files, Excel, or PowerPoint files by adding the operator filetype:doc, filetype:pdf, filetype:xls, or filetype:ppt. You can search for any file type using its extension be it a jpeg, png, gif, mp4, or txt Updated search query:

coronavirus filetype:pdf

site:

You can search within a specific website or a domain using the site: operator. Just add the site: operator followed by the website address or domain. Google will restrict the search to those sites only. Updated search query:

coronavirus filetype:pdf site:gov.in

Exclude something

You can use the hyphen - to exclude a keyword or even combine it with other search operators to exclude a filetype or a site. Updated search query:

coronavirus filetype:pdf site:gov.in -china

intitle:

You can ask google to show only those results that have a specific word in the title of the result using the operator intitle. You already know about the hyphen - operator, which can be used to exclude something from the results. Updated search query:

coronavirus filetype:pdf site:gov.in intitle:novel -intitle:health

Number range

Google can help you to filter out the results by number range, you can indicate the range using two dots between two numbers. The numbers could be years, price range, or any numerical value relevant to your search term. Updated search query:

coronavirus filetype:pdf site:gov.in intitle:novel -intitle:health 2021..2022

Now try out the final search query and compare the results with your results when you completed the above exercise.

Googling is a skill.

These are just a few of the search operators, there are plenty of them. Once you have mastered these, go ahead and learn many other powerful tricks to become a pro google searcher. I hope this article has helped you to learn something new that you can use to improve your google search skill and get better results in less time.