GOOGLE TIPS
Do you know how to use the world's most important search engine? You do? Are you sure about that?
You might be surprised to find out just what it can do. Check out these tips. They'll help!
Exclude Google's Irrelevant Results
Let’s say you’re looking for a recipe to prepare meatballs, but have a tomato intolerance. How do you find what you’re looking for?
1. You can put "meatball recipe" as your search keywords and plough through the results, wasting time with the ones that feature tomatoes. This will give you 257,000 results in Google.
2. You can have "meatball recipe" -tomato instead, which will give you no fewer than 161,000 results completely relevant to your search.
It’s as simple as that. Put a minus sign immediately before the keyword you don’t want to have and the results you get will be exactly what you want.
Focus Your Google Search
You’re looking through a big website with lots of content and want to focus on some specific information. Let’s say you’re looking at the CNN site and want information on when it’s mentioned the word “copywriter”.
So you go to CNN, put “copywriter” in its search box and click away. What do you get? You get a search that gives you every mention of the word you’re after on the Internet, not just from CNN. That’s no use at all.
Here’s what you do:
Simply enter site:cnn.com copywriter in Google’s search box and you’re there.
It’s that simple. site:&URL (don’t leave a space between the two) and your search keyword/keywords.
Google Bookmarks
When you’re away from home or the office and you want to check on some of your favourite websites - at an Internet cafe, say - it’s a real pain to have to either note them all down on paper or remember them in your head. What if you can’t remember the URLs? What do you do then?
I’m forever checking my work email to see what’s arriving and looking at my web stats to see how many visitors I’m getting. And I'm just the same whenever I'm away from home, too. I'm always heading down to Internet cafes to check on things. I admit it; I'm obsessed.
But I have no problems remembering which websites to look at. Why? Because Google Bookmarks make it easy for me.
Go to http://www.google.com/bookmarks/ and log in to your Google account if your browser’s cookies haven’t already logged in for you.
And hey presto! They’re all there, waiting for you. It took me years to realise the site existed and I literally smacked my forehead when I thought of all the time I’d wasted miserably trying to remember website addresses and typing different combos of ".com", ".net" and ".co.uk".
The next time you’re away from your regular computer and need to access the sites that are important to you, remember the time you read this article and mentally thank me!
Googlism
Here’s another time-saving tip that can give you the knowledge you need about something in a split second.
Imagine that you want to find out what people think about something. A person, maybe, or a bit of software. How do you do it? Short of trawling dozens of websites that come up when you enter a search engine request to see what they say, how can you get a super-quick idea of the zeitgeist of the thing you’re researching?
This is how:
http://www.googlism.com/
Check it out. Once you get to the site, put in your search term, click "Googlism!" and see what it gives you.
Word of warning: be prepared! Not every result you see will be necessarily what you are after. But it will capture the essential "story" - the way people view something. Here are a few of the results for the search term "Dennis Bergkamp" (the Arsenal legend):
Granted, what it gives you isn’t the most up-to-date of information, but hey, it’s a start. And those four sentences above actually sum up Dennis's career pretty well! Why not give it a test run?
You’re very welcome to reprint any of these articles on your website and/or newsletters free of charge, provided:
Daniel O'Connor is a website, SEO and marketing copywriter using the name Daniboy. He can be contacted here. Visit http://www.daniboy.com for further details of his services.
You might be surprised to find out just what it can do. Check out these tips. They'll help!
Exclude Google's Irrelevant Results
Let’s say you’re looking for a recipe to prepare meatballs, but have a tomato intolerance. How do you find what you’re looking for?
1. You can put "meatball recipe" as your search keywords and plough through the results, wasting time with the ones that feature tomatoes. This will give you 257,000 results in Google.
2. You can have "meatball recipe" -tomato instead, which will give you no fewer than 161,000 results completely relevant to your search.
It’s as simple as that. Put a minus sign immediately before the keyword you don’t want to have and the results you get will be exactly what you want.
Focus Your Google Search
You’re looking through a big website with lots of content and want to focus on some specific information. Let’s say you’re looking at the CNN site and want information on when it’s mentioned the word “copywriter”.
So you go to CNN, put “copywriter” in its search box and click away. What do you get? You get a search that gives you every mention of the word you’re after on the Internet, not just from CNN. That’s no use at all.
Here’s what you do:
Simply enter site:cnn.com copywriter in Google’s search box and you’re there.
It’s that simple. site:&URL (don’t leave a space between the two) and your search keyword/keywords.
Google Bookmarks
When you’re away from home or the office and you want to check on some of your favourite websites - at an Internet cafe, say - it’s a real pain to have to either note them all down on paper or remember them in your head. What if you can’t remember the URLs? What do you do then?
I’m forever checking my work email to see what’s arriving and looking at my web stats to see how many visitors I’m getting. And I'm just the same whenever I'm away from home, too. I'm always heading down to Internet cafes to check on things. I admit it; I'm obsessed.
But I have no problems remembering which websites to look at. Why? Because Google Bookmarks make it easy for me.
Go to http://www.google.com/bookmarks/ and log in to your Google account if your browser’s cookies haven’t already logged in for you.
And hey presto! They’re all there, waiting for you. It took me years to realise the site existed and I literally smacked my forehead when I thought of all the time I’d wasted miserably trying to remember website addresses and typing different combos of ".com", ".net" and ".co.uk".
The next time you’re away from your regular computer and need to access the sites that are important to you, remember the time you read this article and mentally thank me!
Googlism
Here’s another time-saving tip that can give you the knowledge you need about something in a split second.
Imagine that you want to find out what people think about something. A person, maybe, or a bit of software. How do you do it? Short of trawling dozens of websites that come up when you enter a search engine request to see what they say, how can you get a super-quick idea of the zeitgeist of the thing you’re researching?
This is how:
http://www.googlism.com/
Check it out. Once you get to the site, put in your search term, click "Googlism!" and see what it gives you.
Word of warning: be prepared! Not every result you see will be necessarily what you are after. But it will capture the essential "story" - the way people view something. Here are a few of the results for the search term "Dennis Bergkamp" (the Arsenal legend):
- dennis bergkamp is sent off by referee mike riley for a two footed stomp on liverpool's jamie carragher
- dennis bergkamp is the best football player in the world
- dennis bergkamp is a striker who stands out more because of the quality of his goals than the quantity
- dennis bergkamp is the top scorer in the oranje history
Granted, what it gives you isn’t the most up-to-date of information, but hey, it’s a start. And those four sentences above actually sum up Dennis's career pretty well! Why not give it a test run?
You’re very welcome to reprint any of these articles on your website and/or newsletters free of charge, provided:
- you don’t change the article in any way
- you include the writing credit below (including all website links)
Daniel O'Connor is a website, SEO and marketing copywriter using the name Daniboy. He can be contacted here. Visit http://www.daniboy.com for further details of his services.
