Google-Fu Part 1

Most of us use Google on a daily basis and as you know, sometimes the results can be overwhelming. There are a few simple tricks that can help us narrow our searches down that I'm going to share with you. This is possible using something called 'search operators.'

For example, if you want to search for something very specific, like where you would only want to return results that contain your keywords, you can encase the keywords in quotations. So say you wanted to search for hotels in Kansas City, you could do this:

    "Hotels in Kansas City"

The results that Google brings back will only contain those keywords you encased in the quotations. Pretty cool huh?

Okay, on to the next one. Say you want to search within a certain website, you could do this:

    site:textfiles.com programming

Can you guess what will happen there? You will be searching within the site textfiles.com for the keyword programming. You can also mix and match the operators to get more specific results. So if we were getting too many results we could type:

    site:textfiles.com "c++ programming"

What about if you would like to search for a certain file type? Say PDF format with the file name being something like python programming? You could go about that like this:

    python programming filetype:pdf

All of these search operators are really great if you want to narrow down you search results in Google, or you are looking for something very specific. It is really great also for journalists who are looking for some particular information, or a student doing research. Really the applications are endless and once you get the hang of it, it will shave a lot of time off your internet searching. I hope this helps some of you. If ya'll enjoyed this leave me some feedback and I may just do a follow-up with some more advanced search operators. God bless!