Let's talk about some ways in which you can make your Google searches more
effective, and we'll just type in a sample Google search here. So let's just
look for Rasputin. And you can see that it brings up over 8 million entries. One
thing you can do right away is you could actually do "- Putin" just to get rid
of Vladimir Putin, and that already brings it down to half a million. This
is called a negative search term -- if you just put a hyphen or a line in
front of a term then it tries to exclude those results. One thing you can note as
well is that we have all these tabs. So if we want to look for images or videos
or news then we can do that. Not sure how much news there would be for Rasputin
and I'm not sure how useful maps are, but we definitely have a lot of options here.
You can also go to ... actually let's click on "tools" first and that allows you to
refine your your search somewhat as well. And I would suggest that you bring this
toolbar up whenever you need to do a more refined search. If you go to
"settings" you can search in specific languages, you can also go to advanced
search, and I would suggest you have a look here and then you can add all sorts
of different things to really make your search as specific as possible. Some of
these things also have shortcuts, however we're going to talk about some of the
shortcuts that are available. Okay, let's go back here. Let's say that you know a
specific phrase or quotation that you'd like to find. You can put quotation marks
around it to really make sure that you bring up exactly what you're looking for.
So let's say you want to find the quote "your child will not die" (you can see I've
searched for this before to prepare for this video), now you can see that there's
only seven results, because it's a very specific search. And if you were to
take the quotation marks off, now it becomes much more generic. It's not looking for
those words in exactly that order, and suddenly we're almost up to a million
again. Note as well that you can use asterisks if you remember a phrase but
you can't remember every last word. So let's just
put a couple asterisks here. And then we'll do the search again. Four
results -- not quite as many and maybe they're not quite the same, but we can
see that the quote is still here. And this is great if you for instance
remember part of a song lyric or a famous line and you need to find it
again but you can't remember everything. Alright, let's get rid of all of these
details here. Let's now start searching for Rasputin, but we're going to search
more specifically in parts of the website. So we're going to start by
searching just in the title of websites. We add this little tag "intitle,"
followed by a colon and then our search term. This limits it then to just a
quarter of a million and that's pretty good. Now we're really starting to
get more specific. We can limit it even further if we type in the URL. So that would
be in the link at the top here. Let's try that, and that's a little bit narrower
again. Let's see here. We can make it broader by typing in "intext."
And this will look in the text of the website. You can see that we
get quite a few more results there. So that's one way to do it. Another thing we
can do is we can look for particular file types. Let's type in "filetype"
and then a colon, and then we can designate the file type that we're
looking for. Let's say we want to look for a PowerPoint, we write "ppt" and let's
see here ... And then we can see all sorts of PowerPoints coming up. And that's
really cool because if you have to do a PowerPoint I would suggest you don't
copy these powerpoints, but you can at least look at them for inspiration, and
see what kind of information they are providing. The same kind of thing goes
for PDFs. So you can write PDF, you can write a Doc or look for a Doc file. So
this would be a Word file, you can even look for an XLS file, which would be
Excel (like a spreadsheet). But as you can see this has very little to do with
Rasputin. But in other cases it may be quite useful. Alright, the next thing
you can do is you can look for old forms of a website.
Now I'm going to give you an example here, so if you let's say find this
website ... so this is the the new leader of the Conservative Party of Canada at this
moment, and you can see that his policy website after he got elected has changed.
It just says "Thank you," but if you want to find the previous version of this, you
can actually take this link and sometimes if it has been changed just
in the last little while, you can type in "cache" and then a colon and
then the website and then if it if it has changed recently then you can
actually find what it looked like before. Now in this case that doesn't work
because the website has been changed a little while in the past. What we can
do then as a backup option is we can go to the web archive -- just Google for
web archive, go there, and now we can use their search function (once this loads) ...
Alright, there we go. So we're going to enter the URL, and now we can see that
there have been some changes. There's been a bunch of changes here, and
we'll just go back to May the 25th (so that's a month or two ago -- just under a
month), and let's see what we can find here. Okay, so there is our website, and
this is what it looked like before. Wait a second! He had all kinds of policies. So
where did they go? It's convenient that they're gone. That allows
you then to look for cached websites and for older previous versions of what
particular websites look like. Another thing you can do in Google is you can
look for websites that are similar to one that you're interested in.
Let's say that you really love the Khan Academy. You really love the Khan
Academy. They have some great resources and you want to see if there's anything
similar. Well, we can type in "related" before, and we're going to search for
this now and lo and behold: look at all these interesting websites that teach
different things -- whether it's Coursera or Math.com. That gives us a
wealth of different options in terms of similar sites to the Khan Academy.
Let's look at something else we can do. [Let's] close a couple tabs here. Let's say that
you find this website -- this kind of encyclopedia about birds, and you just
love this parakeet and you want to find out some more information about it. One
thing you can do is you can copy the link and then you can go to a new tab
and just write in "link" and a colon. And then we're going to put our link
here and now we can see where this particular page has been linked. So other
pages may be linking to it, and we may want to check out what these pages have
to say. Let's just go here for instance so. Oops, ... that's a
different one. Let's try a different one. Here, let's do this one. This one is
definitely quite different. Alright, so here we can see that there are links and
now we can see that this links to our previous page. And we have all sorts of
new information or sometimes similar information that might be of use.
That's a great way to see how particular websites are linked to each other.
Of course if you own your own website then this is perfect. This is a
great way to see where other people are using your information or sharing what
you have to offer. Another great thing you can do in Google is you can look for
definitions. So you can type in "define." Let's say we want to define the word
"define." Let's do that. There we go. There is a definition. There are the other ways
to do this as well. You can just type in "definition" and then the word or
something like that. But this is a great way to use Google as your dictionary.
Alright, another thing that you can do is you can search particular sites. Let's
say that I want to search the website "the nature of writing," which is of course
my website (natureofwriting.com), and I really want to search it for pronouns --
anything that has to do with pronouns. So let's search for that now.
You can see that all the pages that show up are from the same website, and you can
even add a specific page if you want to search within that. So you could add
something at the end here to make this page really specific and search inside
of it. Another thing you can do though is you can search in a particular page by
just pressing "ctrl F" and that will bring up a search box. And then you can find
you know "parakeet" for instance and you can find every last use of
the word parakeet. There are quite a few of these. Let's do something else now.
Let's see if we can find some images and play around with those. Let's type in
"Teresa May." There we go: Theresa May. She's the current Prime Minister of
England. So let's go to images. If you click on one of her images -- so right
click on one of her images ... let's just pick this one. It's kind of an unusual
one. You can see where this image has all been used. So we're going to press on
"search Google for image" and this will allow us to see actually if this image
has been replicated a number of times and then how often and then also on what
kinds of websites, which is really kind of an interesting exercise to do. Another
cool thing we can do is we can add the @ sign if we want to search just in social
media. Let's say we're interested in Donald Trump, then we can search for that
and we can even add a hashtag if we want. So we will just add the hashtag before
and you can see that there are these interesting suggestions. And if you look
for "trumpregrets" for instance then you can see all these people who have
regretted voting for Trump apparently. Those are a couple ways to search social
media. Use the @ sign and also use the hashtag, and that will allow you to find
particular results. One thing we haven't mentioned yet is the the word "or." If you
use or capitalized (make sure that you capitalize both letters) then you can
look for alternatives. Let's say that you don't care if
you're looking for the ultramarathon or the Ironman, then you can search
for particular results and we'll just add something here: "painkillers." Now we
can see that both of these results are going to show up. Last thing to mention
is that you can have also lots of fun with Google. You can put in these little
search terms that are kind of Easter eggs that are little jokes. And I'll just
finish with one. If you type in "do a barrel roll" ... there we go. Look what
happens to our screen! There we go. And there are lots of other ones like this.
I would suggest you have a look at them online but I won't bore you with
all of them. That's it for maximizing your Google results and making sure that
your searches are effective. Hopefully you found this useful.