Super GOOGLE: Top 12 Advanced Search Techniques
Summary
TLDRThis video script offers a comprehensive guide on enhancing Google search efficiency with 12 advanced techniques. It covers precise searching through quoted phrases, excluding terms with the minus operator, and site-specific searches. The script also introduces Boolean operators for complex queries, searching from the URL bar, domain-specific searches, file type filters, and using wildcards for flexible term matching. The goal is to find the right information the first time, not just more information.
Takeaways
- đ **Exact Match Searches**: Use quotation marks to find pages with the exact phrase or name specified, ensuring precision in search results.
- â **Exclusion with Minus Operator**: Utilize the minus sign to exclude specific words or phrases from search results, refining the information to avoid irrelevant content.
- đą **Site-Specific Searches**: Employ 'site:' followed by a domain to perform searches within a specific website, leveraging Google's search capabilities for better results than the site's native search.
- â **Inclusion with Plus Operator**: Prefix terms with a plus sign to ensure they appear in search results, guaranteeing the presence of specific words or phrases.
- đ **OR Operator for Expansion**: Use the OR operator to broaden the search scope by including pages that contain at least one of multiple terms.
- đ **AND Operator for Selectivity**: Combine the AND operator with other search terms to narrow down results to pages that contain all specified terms.
- đ **Parentheses for Complex Queries**: Use parentheses to group terms and create more complex, precise search queries, particularly useful for combining multiple search operators.
- đ **Search from URL Bar**: Perform Google searches directly from the URL bar of your browser, even without visiting Google's homepage.
- đ **Domain-Specific Shortcuts**: Type a domain name like 'Amazon' or 'YouTube' into the URL bar to switch the search context to that specific domain, simplifying the search process.
- đ **File Type Searches**: Use the 'filetype:' operator to find documents in specific formats, such as PDFs or Excel spreadsheets, tailored to the user's needs.
- đŻ **Title-Specific Searches**: Use 'intitle:' to search for terms that appear specifically in the title of documents or web pages, enhancing the relevance of search results.
Q & A
What is the main purpose of the video script?
-The main purpose of the video script is to teach viewers the top 12 ways to make their Google searches faster and more effective, covering various search techniques and operators.
What is the significance of using quotation marks in Google searches?
-Using quotation marks in Google searches ensures that the search engine looks for the exact phrase specified, in that exact order, rather than just pages that contain the words in any order or as a subset.
How does the minus operator help in refining Google search results?
-The minus operator allows users to exclude pages that contain a specific word or phrase from their search results, helping to narrow down the results to more relevant pages.
What is a site search and how can it be used?
-A site search is a technique where you specify a domain name along with your search query to restrict the search to that particular website. It's useful for when a website's own search function is not effective or when you want to use Google's advanced search features on a specific site.
Can you explain the use of the plus operator in Google searches?
-The plus operator ensures that a specific search term must appear in the search results. It is used to make absolutely sure that the pages in the results contain the term prefixed by the plus sign.
What does the 'or' operator do in a Google search?
-The 'or' operator is used to find pages that contain at least one of the two terms specified. It broadens the search scope by including results that match either term.
How can parentheses be used to enhance the precision of a Google search?
-Parentheses can be used to group terms and create complex search queries, allowing for more specific combinations of terms and the use of Boolean operators within the grouped terms.
What is the benefit of searching from the URL bar instead of going to Google's homepage?
-Searching from the URL bar allows for quicker access to Google's search results without having to navigate to the Google homepage, and it supports the use of all the advanced search techniques discussed in the script.
What is domain searching and how can it simplify the search process?
-Domain searching is a shortcut that allows users to search within a specific website directly from the URL bar by typing the domain name, which then changes the search context to that website only.
How can the 'in url' operator be used to find specific pages based on their URL content?
-The 'in url' operator can be used to search for pages that contain specific text within their URL. This is particularly useful when you know a product ID or a specific identifier that you want to find on a website.
What is the purpose of the 'file type' operator in Google searches?
-The 'file type' operator allows users to search for documents or data in a specific format, such as PDF or Excel, by specifying the file type followed by the colon and the desired file extension.
How can the 'in title' operator be used to find documents with specific terms in their title?
-The 'in title' operator can be used to search for documents where the specified term appears in the title of the document. It helps to find relevant documents more quickly by focusing on the document title.
What is the wildcard operator and how can it be used in Google searches?
-The wildcard operator, represented by an asterisk, matches any word or phrase in a search query. It can be used within more complex expressions to find variations of a term or to fill in unknown parts of a phrase.
Outlines
đ Advanced Google Search Techniques
This paragraph introduces a comprehensive guide to enhancing Google search efficiency. It covers 12 advanced search methods, such as quoted searches for exact phrases, the minus operator to exclude terms, and site-specific searches. The focus is on precision and selectivity in search results, ensuring users find the most relevant information the first time.
đ Utilizing Operators for Specific Searches
The second paragraph delves into the use of search operators like the plus sign for mandatory inclusion, the or operator for broadening search scope, and parentheses for complex queries. It discusses how these operators can be combined to perform precise searches, including site-specific searches with operators and searching from the URL bar using Google's default search engine.
đ Specialized Search Features and Shortcuts
This paragraph highlights specialized search features, including domain searching for specific sites like Amazon and YouTube directly from the URL bar, URL searches for finding pages with particular IDs or UPCs, and file type searches to locate documents in formats like PDF or Excel. It also touches on text and title searches to find terms specifically in document titles and the use of wildcards for matching unknown or variable terms within searches.
đ Conclusion and Call to Action
The final paragraph serves as a conclusion to the video script, encouraging viewers to subscribe and like for more content. It reiterates the importance of the search techniques shared and hints at future topics that may be explored in 'Dave's Garage'. The paragraph also subtly promotes a book related to autism and Asperger's syndrome, positioning it as a valuable resource for those interested in the subject.
Mindmap
Keywords
đĄGoogle
đĄSearch Techniques
đĄQuotation Marks
đĄMinus Operator
đĄSite Search
đĄPlus Operator
đĄOR Operator
đĄAND Operator
đĄParentheses
đĄURL Bar
đĄFile Type Operator
đĄIn Title Operator
đĄWildcard Operator
Highlights
Revolutionizing Google search with top 12 ways to make searches faster and more effective.
Using quoted searches to find exact phrases or names.
The minus operator to exclude specific words or phrases from search results.
Site search to use Google's search capabilities on specific websites.
Plus operator to ensure certain search terms appear in the results.
Using the or operator to find pages with either of two terms.
Parentheses to create complex search queries for more precise results.
Searching from the URL bar for quick and direct Google searches.
Domain searching for specific public websites directly from the URL bar.
Searching by file type to find documents in specific formats like PDF or Excel.
Text and title searches to find terms that appear only in the title of documents.
Wildcard operator to match any word or phrase within search expressions.
Practical applications of these search techniques for more effective information retrieval.
Improving search precision by combining multiple search operators and techniques.
How to find the right information the first time using advanced Google search methods.
Examples of using site-specific searches for platforms like GitHub, Wikipedia, Reddit, and Amazon.
The importance of using exact phrases and how to ensure they appear in search results.
Tips for refining searches to match specific criteria and exclude irrelevant results.
Transcripts
if you use Google today is your lucky
day because I'm about to revolutionize
how you search for things by showing you
the top 12 ways that you can make your
Google searching faster and far more
effective and I'm not talking about just
using that advanced tab I mean truly
powerful searches we'll cover search
tags file types domain searches Boolean
operators and a great deal more once you
know them I'm sure you'll agree that
some of these tips are so effective that
you'll wonder how you ever found
anything without them I'll run down the
full top 12 list right here today in
Dave's Garage
foreign
[Music]
welcome to my shop as we look at the top
12 ways to make your searching more
effective you might begin to wonder how
you can improve on the already excellent
results that Google gives you today
well the answer can be found in the fact
that most of what we do here today is
not to find more results because Google
already has that part down pat and if
you're looking for the most popular
result associated with a common phrase
like chocolate chip cookies they have
you covered there as well what we'll be
primarily doing today is exploring how
to make your searches far more precise
and selective it's not about finding
more information it's about finding the
right information the first time
number 12 quoted searches
quoted searches are the very first
technique you should Master when you put
a set of words in quotation marks like
John Quincy Adams you get only results
that contain that exact name or phrase
you would not see any hits for just John
Adams if on the other hand you didn't
quote it Google is likely smart enough
to find you the top results but they
could still include any pages that
mention John Adams without regard to
which one you were talking about
other examples might include Martin
Luther versus Martin Luther King and
George W bush versus George H.W bush by
using quotation marks you ensure that
the results you get back include the
exact phrase that you specify
the quoted searches are especially
powerful when searching for direct
quotes or passages of text because it
will match only that exact set of words
in that order whereas unquoted search
can return any page that includes the
words in any order or even just a subset
of them sometimes with quotation marks
It's All or Nothing
number 11 the minus operator
using the minus operator allows you to
specify that you only want pages that do
not contain the word or phrase that you
indicate for example if you want recipes
for chocolate chip cookies that make no
mention of peanuts or peanut butter you
could search for peanut butter cookies
and then add minus peanut the results
you get to exclude anything that
mentions peanuts you can also exclude
whole phrases for example if you weren't
worried about peanuts themselves but you
still wanted to exclude any pages that
made reference to peanut butter you
could search for peanut butter cookies
minus and in quotes peanut butter where
peanut butter is as I said quoted and
preceded by the minus sign that will
still allow pages that include the word
peanut by itself but exclude any that
make mention of peanut butter
number 10 site search
have you ever been using a website that
had its own search box for finding stuff
on that site but where their search was
terrible and you knew for sure that if
you could just use Google search on that
site instead it would likely find what
you needed quickly well the good news is
that you can do just that then it's
super easy you simply specify Scythe
colon and the domain name you want to
search followed by whatever it is that
you're actually looking for
let's say I want to find a user profile
on GitHub rather than going to GitHub
and navigating around to it I can simply
enter a search that restricts the
results to pages on GitHub followed by
the profile name and so if I enter site
colon github.com space Dave PL the first
hit will be my profile page on GitHub
this technique is especially useful even
when the basic search works on a website
because it allows you to employ most
everything we learn here today on any
specific website for example you can
combine the site tag with any powerful
Google search and the net results that
you can use everything in Google's
expressive search grammar to narrowly
search any particular website
why would you do such a thing well here
are just a few examples Wikipedia has
thousands if not millions of Articles
and you can rest assured they've all
been indexed by Google so if you're
doing research or anything that requires
more than just basic keyword searches do
it with Google instead
Reddit has a notoriously poor search and
I think you'll be way ahead of the game
if you use Google to search Reddit
instead just put site colon reddit.com
in front of whatever it is that you want
to find on their site
Amazon has a bajillion products but many
of the search results are sponsored and
the content match system has a habit of
giving you a cornucopia of results that
almost match what you're looking for but
not quite let's say you're looking for
24 volt individually addressable LED
strips if we enter that search into
Amazon itself the first four results are
sponsored results that include a mix of
12 and 5 volt strips but no 24 volt
strips at all the fifth strip shown is
24 volts thankfully but the very next
one is 5 volts again so as much as I
love Amazon their search seems a little
too eager to get you to buy something
anything rather than nothing and I've
made the mistake once or twice of just
assuming that the top search results
would match the criteria that I
specified when I didn't If instead I
searched using site colon amazon.com 24v
individually addressable LED strip the
results are now actually 24 volts in
most of the cases but what if I want to
make absolutely sure that the page is
referenced 24 volts like a specified 24v
LED strip in quotes but that's a little
too specific many pages related to 24
volt LED strips may not have that exact
phrase so how do we do it we do it with
a plus operator our next tip number nine
the plus operator
when you want to make absolutely
positively sure that a search term
appears on the pages that form your
results all you need to do is to prefix
that term with a plus sign thus in our
LED example we would search Amazon as
follows scythecool and amazon.com plus
24v LED strip
when we run that query sure enough every
single result includes 24v now it's also
possible that one of the results is a
page that includes the phrase does not
support 24v but that's sort of an edge
case and you still need to vet any
results to confirm that they do indeed
match your criteria let's say that you
want to search Wikipedia for articles
about Egypt but only ancient Egypt you
can simply search for sitecool on
wikipedia.org plus ancient plus Egypt
that means the results must come from
the Wikipedia site and they must contain
the words ancient and Egypt but not in
any particular order or relative
proximity if that's actually what you
wanted to do find pages that must
contain the phrase ancient Egypt you
could quote it and put a plus operator
in front of the phrase and that would
ensure that you only get pages from
Wikipedia that have the exact phrase
ancient Egypt
number eight the or operator
what if we wanted to find pages about
either of Two Towns let's say we want
information on both Humboldt and Milford
Saskatchewan
which is to say we want to find pages
that include the word Saskatchewan at
least one of either Humboldt or Melford
we write the simple search as
Saskatchewan Melford or Humboldt with
the only caveat being that you have to
use upper case on the ore operator if
you prefer you can also use the vertical
pipe operator instead the or operator
can be especially helpful in cases where
you want to expand rather than restrict
the scope of a search for example you
might use the or operator to search for
information when you're not quite sure
which words best describe it
there are also cases where two or more
words relate to the same thing but
perhaps one is plural and so you could
write Buffalo or bison to search for
pages that include either word form
there are cases such as bicycle or bike
where the words are different enough
that you'll want to include both
as another example perhaps you're
researching cell phone plans well you'll
be further ahead if you search for
smartphone or cell phone or mobile phone
as will have a much broader reach
one of the more powerful techniques is
to First broaden a search and then
narrow it down by combining terms let's
say we want to search for vanilla or
chocolate cake the problem here is that
it won't do what we want instead
returning pages that contain the word
vanilla anywhere or chocolate cake
anywhere but not vanilla cake to do that
we need another feature bonus the and
operator
when you want to be very selective about
the pages that are returned you can use
the and operator to ensure that both
sides of the term are included you could
for example search for minus
Saskatchewan and and then in parentheses
Humboldt or Melford which would return
pages that do not include Saskatchewan
but that do include at least one of
Humboldt or Milford
it seems to me that anything you can do
with the and operator can likely be done
with the parentheses and the plus
operator if you could think of something
that can only be done with the and
operator let me know in the comments
until then though we'll just consider
the and operator to be a bonus tip
number seven parentheses
in parentheses in our searches allows us
to be very specific about our intent in
our vanilla or chocolate cake example
what we really wanted to search for was
pages that contained vanilla cake or
chocolate cake you could write that out
fully like that but there's a more
elegant way we use parentheses to
rewrite the search as in parentheses
vanilla or chocolate and then K the use
of parentheses also enables much more
complex scenarios let's say I'm looking
for William H Gates on the internet I
might write that as in quotes in
parentheses Bill or William and
parentheses Gates and quotes minus
senior easier to look on the screen if
you're not on a podcast in this case I'm
looking for pages that contain the exact
phrase Bill Gates or William Gates and
those pages should not contain senior
because that would be his dad and not
him as you can see it appears in
parentheses and the Boolean operators
function well within a quoted phrase and
that's a mechanism that can be used to
perform searches with great precision
another example consider searching for
in parentheses gray or red and then in
parentheses well for Fox which will
return any of the four combinations gray
wolf red wolf gray fox and red fox
number six searching from the URL bar
odds are you already know that as long
as Google is configured as your default
search engine you can enter searches
right into the URL bar without going to
google.com first if not that's the
biggest news of the day but as the most
basic example if I type banana into the
URL bar and press enter it does not go
to banana.com but rather it searches for
the term banana using Google if you did
want to go to banana.com hold down
control and hit enter and it just
asda.com for you
don't thank me send money what you may
not be aware of is that everything we've
learned here so far can also be entered
directly into the URL bar if you enter
apple or orange in parentheses followed
by juice you'll immediately get back
pages that include apple juice or orange
juice you can also use quotation marks
to firm up those requests the one thing
that sometimes gets in my way however is
actually a feature and not a bug it's
called domain searching and we'll check
it out next
number five domain searching
for a number of well-known public
websites like Amazon and YouTube you can
run a search right from the URL bar just
by typing the property name into the
address bar as an example watch what
happens when I simply type Amazon into
the URL bar the input box suddenly
changes slightly to reflect that my
search will only be run on Amazon you
could accomplish the same thing with the
site tag that we learned earlier but
this is a simple shortcut for people
that don't know that grammar
if you're looking for the year's best
fail videos on YouTube you'd start up by
entering the word YouTube which switches
the search context from the entire web
to just YouTube itself and then whatever
you happen to enter next is executed as
your actual search query but again only
on YouTube
number four URL searches
they're going to be times where you know
that something is relevant or important
and it appears within the actual URL
let's say you know the ID or UPC of a
product that you're searching for we can
search for just pages on Amazon that
contain that ID by using the in url
operator as an example let's search for
pages that occur on Amazon and that
include the ID of my book for people who
believe they might be on the Spectrum
our search query would look like this
site colon amazon.com in url and in the
ID of the book as you can plainly see we
first require that anything we find must
be located on the amazon.com website and
that the URL to it must also include the
ID tag of the book and sure enough when
we execute this query we get a set of
pages immediately backing with the book
and it's pretty restrictive it's a super
specific way to compose a query where
you know exactly what you're looking for
but you have no idea where it will live
on the site number three searching by
file type
what if you wish to find data in a
particular format like a PDF document or
an Excel spreadsheet fortunately this is
easy with the file type operator let's
say you're searching for a secret budget
from 1999 but that you're only
interested if it comes in a PDF file you
would compose your query like this file
type colon PDF 1999 secret budget the
first result we get back is a PDF file
of the US Secret Service budget but
that's not the type of secret that I
meant so let's try making it more
precise We'll add minus and then the
phrase Secret Service by excluding the
erroneous Secret Service documents our
top results now pertain to secret or
black military budgets which is what we
were looking for in the first place
number two text and title searches
with most searches you don't care where
your search term appears on the page but
sometimes it does matter for example you
might want to specify that you're
searching only the title of the document
which you can achieve with the in title
tag which of course can also be combined
with other tags we've already learned
so for example if we want PDF documents
with Saskatchewan in the title we would
do it as follows in title colon
Saskatchewan file type colon PDF
sure enough every search result is now a
downloadable PDF document with
Saskatchewan in the title number one
wild cards
perhaps the most underutilized search
operator is the Wild Card operator
represented by the asterisk it matches
anything and everything which doesn't
sound that useful at first Until you
realize that you can use it inside more
complicated Expressions this query means
we must have the quick brown anything
and then either the word jumps or jumped
and then over the anything dog thus it
would match the quick brown fox jumped
over the lazy dog but it would also
match the quick brown Sea Monkey Jumped
over the scurvy dog one important caveat
is that the wildcard operator can take
the place of any search term and can be
used to match whole words or phrases
even within quotation marks but it can't
appear within a single word or term it
does appear to work in some cases at the
end of a term so if you're searching for
cities that contain Sask but that do not
include Saskatchewan on the page you
could search as follows
Sask star minus Saskatchewan city that
will return pages that do contain words
starting with Sask but I do not mention
Saskatchewan and our first result comes
back as a page relating to Saskatoon
note with this query you'd only get
pages that mention Saskatoon but not
Saskatchewan if you have any interest in
matters related to autism Asperger's or
ASD please check out my book on Amazon
secrets of the artistic millionaire it's
got nothing to do with money and
everything to do with living a
successful life on the Spectrum it's
everything I know now that I wish I'd
known back then I'm mostly in this for
the subs and likes so please be sure to
leave me one of each before you go today
in the meantime and in between time I
hope to see you next time right here in
Dave's Garage
when you want to make absolutely
absolutely
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