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Google processes more than 40 thousand user searches every second. That means that while you were reading this phrase, people googled something about 200 thousand times. But did they find exactly what they were looking for?
We have collected and tested several ideas that will help you become a professional googler and find any information more efficiently – not only in search engines, but also on social media. If you’re ready to improve your search skills and find exactly what you’re looking for, head over to Wanted Win for an exciting gaming experience!
How to search multiple sites at once
For example, you’ve seen a course that looks interesting for improving your professional skills, but you didn’t save it right away. Now all the stars are aligned and you have time to study, but the link has been lost. You don’t have to go through all the pages of our courses – you can simply set the search engine to the restrictions you need.
To search on Google and limit the results to only the sites you need, write your query in the search bar (in our case, “course”), and then specify which resources you want to search on: site:site1 OR site:site2, etc. You can specify as many sites as you like – there are no restrictions. Or maybe we haven’t reached them yet 🙂
This is how the query will look like in our case:
Important! Be careful with your spelling: in particular, don’t insert extra spaces after colons or write the word OR in lowercase. If you do so, the search engine will not understand that this is a command, not part of the query, and, in fact, will not find anything.
How to search only on a specific website
Usually, built-in search engines on websites are not very convenient. If you need to find information on a specific resource, it’s faster to use Google than to do it manually.
A life hack similar to the previous one can be used if you need to find information on a specific website. In this case, you just need to type the site:site command after the search. For example, you’re looking for information about koalas, but you want to see only data from a verified source, such as Wikipedia.
So the search query would look like this: chipmunk site:wikipedia.org
This method will come in handy when you need to find something on social media in a more structured way – for example, on Instagram or TikTok.
So, to search for certain content on Instagram, use the following formula: Searchingsite:instagram.com [query] AND [query].
For example, the author wants to find ideas for the content of her dog’s Instagram page for spring and decides to look for ideas from other bloggers. So the search query will look like this: SearchingSite:instagram.com [pitbull] AND [spring].
Again, to get a good result, it’s important to be accurate in spelling and punctuation: don’t change the case of letters or add spaces.
To avoid clicking on the suggested links every time, you can limit your results by clicking on the filters below the search bar when searching for images.
You can also use the site: and inurl: commands (which searches for words in a link) to limit your search to include or exclude entire groups of websites.
For example, by using the site:gov.ua command, you will receive only relevant pages on government websites.
How to narrow your search
Sometimes, especially on the first pages, a search engine will return only partially relevant results for your query. If, for example, you want to find certain technical documentation or any document from which you have a quote, you can set up your search to get an exact match.
For example, when you ask Google how to improve your search, it returns 8 billion pages.
If we want to narrow these results down to only the most relevant ones, we can put the phrase in quotation marks. For the same query, but in quotation marks, the number of responses was reduced to 66 thousand.
How to remove the unnecessary
By putting a minus sign (or a hyphen) in front of a number or a specific word, you can exclude it from the search results. This can be useful if you get too many results that are related to your topic but not relevant to your query.
For example, you want to find a vampire movie for tonight, but you’re not interested in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series. In this case, you can write a search query like this: a vampire film -buffy
The minus sign indicates that you should remove any results containing the word “Buffy” from the search results.
How to find contacts of the right person
This feature is useful, for example, for HR managers who would like to see a candidate’s social media or hunt for a specialist but don’t know their contacts.
Enter [person’s name] (site:instagram.com | site:facebook.com | site:tiktok.com) to find their profiles on the respective platforms.
It is important to understand that this method will only work if the person has entered their real name, i.e. surname and first name, in their profile.
How to find content for a specific period
Social media platforms prioritise recent and trending content. This makes it difficult to find certain posts or materials that were published a long time ago.
However, Google allows you to search for information on social media for certain periods of time. For example, you’re preparing for Valentine’s Day and want to see what creative brands used last year.
Then your query will look like this: NYX before:2023-02-01 after:2023-02-15 site:instagram.com to find the relevant brand posts.
You can now also set the time interval in the toolbar right below the search bar, but sometimes the search results vary.
How to find a specific file type
Google Search can also find different file types by using the appropriate file extensions. These include office documents (docx, pptx, xlxs, rtf, odt, odp, odx, etc.) and pdfs. So, if you want to find a document in a certain format – for example, a presentation about Picasso – the query will look like this: picasso filetype:ppt
However, the results largely depend on the topic. For example, the results for picasso filetype:ppt are more productive than those for Netflix presentations.
How to search on YouTube
YouTube allows you to search for videos, channels, playlists, or specific users on the platform. Some of the operator commands offered by YouTube for searching within the site are very similar to Google’s:
- Use quotation marks to search for an exact phrase. For example: “social media marketing”.
- Add a minus sign (-) in front of a keyword to exclude videos that contain that word. For example: marketing -SMM
- Use the (|) symbol to find videos that contain either of two keywords. For example: marketing | advertising