Google Search Tips – How many times have you conducted a search on google and it returned over a million results? It can be quite frustrating to pick and choose from those million results to find what you are looking for. Today, I’m going to give you some google search tips to help make your task much easier. At Advanced Technology Investigations we conduct internet searches most every day using advanced google searches as one of our many tools to quickly find useful information in the coarse of our investigations.
Google searches have many algorithms that return results depending on what you plug into the search box. The more you can tell google about what you are looking for, the better the results that will be returned. Think about the things that are going through your mind as you are thinking about your search, also think about the terms that may be similar that you may want to NOT show up in your results. Google will allow you to be as specific or as broad as you want to search, so with that in mind lets look at some terms and methods to help get your search targeted.
“office supplies greensboro” When you want to narrow down a search to give you broad but defined topic try putting your term or phrase in parentheses.
Site: office depot.com – If you only want to search a specific website, then start your search with the term “site:” in from of the website you want to search.
sticky notes site: officedepot.com– Now include what you are looking for in front of the word “site:” then include the specific website you would like to search from.
related: starting your search with “related:” will return results related to the word or phrase of your search.
link: If you are looking for a link to get you to someplace specific, just add “link:” before your search term.
phone: john_doe – Looking for a phone number of someone on the internet, no problem, just use “phone:” before the name your looking for.
intitle: A specific title can be easily found with the function “intitle:”
cache: – Cache is a page that google took a snapshot of on an earlier date that may show you information that may not exist on the website today.
+ – Putting the plus or minus sign in front of your search term will exclude words using the minus, and include all words with the plus sign.
left or right – Adding the word “OR” between two words can be useful if your trying to find out which similar term will return the most relevant results you are searching for.
I hope this short tutorial will make your searches on Google much more productive for you. Here is a link from Google that can help you remember some of the most used advanced search methods to assist you. http://www.google.com/advanced_search
Advanced Technology Investigations, LLC
