Search and you shall find TECHNOFILE While Google is not the only search engine on the web, it still remains
the most popular, despite some significant competition. If your Google know-how extends no further than typing a few words and pressing enter, here are some tips to really exploit your quest for online answers by TimStackpool
Eachword you add to the searchwill fur- ther focus your query. Since all thewords you enter are considered by Google, each additionalwordwill limit the results. If you limit too much, you might miss a lot of useful information. Themain advantage to startingwith fewer keywords is that, if you don’t get what you need, the results will likely give you a good indication of what additional words are needed to refine your results on the next search.
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By putting inverted commas or “double quotes” around a set ofwords, Googlewill only search for those exactwords in that exact orderwithout any change. But use with caution, because using this type of search might cause you to miss good results accidentally. For example, a search for “Tim Stackpool” (with quotes) will miss the pages that refer to Timothy G. Stackpool.
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You don’t have to search the entire inter- net when using Google if you know the information you seek is containedwithin a single site. For example, the query events site:
executivepa.asia will return pages about events but only from exec-
utivepa.asia. A simpler query, such as events
executivepa.asia or events Exec- utivePAMagazinewill usually be just as good, though it might return results from other sites that mention the maga- zine. You can also specify a whole class of sites, for example events site:.sg will return results only from .sg domains.
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Terms you want to exclude Attaching a minus signimmediately before a word indicates that you do not
Search within a specific website using site
Phrase search – using inverted commas
Describe what you need with as few terms as possible
want pages that contain this word to appear in your results. The minus sign should appear immediately before the word and should be preceded with a space. For example, in the query anti-virus software, the minus sign is used as a hyphen andwill not be interpreted as an exclusion symbol, whereas the query anti-virus -software will search for the words ‘anti-virus’ but exclude references to software.
‘wildcard’ as technogeeks call it, is a lit- tle-known feature that can be very pow- erful. If you include * within a query, it tells Google to try and treat the asterisk as a replacement for any unknown terms, and then subsequently find the best matches. For example, the search: Google * will give you results about many of Google’s products. The query IndiaPAs*
5 Fill in the blanks This one is a true gem. The *, or
events will give you stories about differ- ent events for PAs in
India.Note that the * symbolwillwork only onwholewords, not parts of words.
6 TheOR Google ordinarily considers all the
words in a search. If you want to specifi- cally alloweither one of severalwords, you can use the word OR to connect the search terms, For example, ExecutivePA 12 years experience OR 15 years experi- encewill give you results about either one of these levels of experience, whereas Executive PA 12 15 years experience (without the OR) will show pages that include both levels of experience on the same page. Note that you have to type ‘OR’ in ALLCAPS. You might also think that thewordANDneeds to added in the latter example, but Google assumesAND to be in place unless something else, like OR, is added. E
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