Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's take a look at some Goggle search techniques.
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So no matter what you do on your Mac you probably perform web searches at some point or another
throughout the day. You can simply type the terms that you want to search for and see what results
you get. But there are a variety of special things that you can put in a Goggle search that will help
you find what you want faster. I'm want to start off with the one I use the most which
is to perform a site specific search. You do this by using the word site followed by a colon
with no space after it and then immediately type the domain name of the website.
So, for instance, if I want to search for iMovie I might just type iMovie. But if I wanted to search
MacMost for iMovie tutorials I would simply type iMovie followed by site:and then MacMost.com.
Notice that all my results, every single one of them, is going to be at MacMost.com. Now you don't
need to include the entire domain. If you want to search for just the top level domain like say
.edu you could do that instead. Then you could get results in any website that ends with .edu.
After that the next most common thing I use is Minus to
eliminate some results. For instance I could type iMovie and then if I look at the results
I'm going to get various things here including some pages that have reviews in them. If I want to
not have any review show up I could subtract review and you won't find any results
that use that term. Likewise you could use Plus to make sure something is included.
So if you just wanted to see iMovie reviews you could use plus instead and you could
see all the results are going to include review either in the title or the body.
Another thing you could do is use Quotes. Quotes will do two things. First they will
actually make sure that exact term is used in the result. Not a synonym for it and not maybe left
off if there are other search terms in there as well. The other thing they will do is combine
words to make sure they appear exactly in that order together. So if I were to do, say, knitting
tutorial, the results are going to have exactly knitting tutorial. Not some other word for
tutorial or knitting and not those two words in different parts. So you could see here most
of the titles have it in there and in some cases it would be used in the body as well.
Now you can use some of these together. For instance you could use Minus and Site
together to eliminate websites. So if I were to search for iMovie here
you could see I get results that are Apple.com. If I want to remove Apple.com from the results
I could do -site.apple.com. My results will include everything else but not apple.com.
Now you could see the first result here is Wikipedia. I could add another minus site
to that and let's say I do .com. That's actually not going to work because Wikipedia is .org. But
I could just do an asterisk instead and you could see now it knows to remove .org, .com, .whatever.
Another modifier you can use is intitle. If you use intitle: and then you put a search term.
Then you're only going to get results to have that search term in the actual title.
Not just the body of the text. You can combine these. So let's do a second term.
Now I'm only going to get pages that have both knitting and tutorial in the title of the page.
There's a companion one to this, intext. If you do intext instead of intitle it's looking in the body
of the page. You can also do inurl. So if I do iMovie and then inurl and say forum then the url,
the actual webpage address, has to have the word forum in it. So you could see here it's included
in all of the url's here. So let's say I wanted to search MacMost for iMovie and I only wanted to see
what was in the forum, not in the tutorials. So I could do site.macmost.com then inurl:forum. You
could see every single one of the results matches that. I could put a minus in front of inurl to
eliminate all of the forum responses and just see every other page at MacMost that contains iMovie.
Now using Wildcards in Goggle searches is kind of tricky. They don't work the same way they do
in programming languages and database searches. But you can use them for
some things. For instance if you type something like, how to and then an asterisk
on a mac, you're going to get results that tend to follow the how to and then some text here on a
mac. You'll see a lot of these are similar and it will start to diverge later down in the results.
Now a big one that really hasn't been with us for that long is the ability to search before a date
or after a date. So let's say I want to search for knitting tutorials but I want to find recent
ones. I can do after and then colon and then a date. But the date has to be in a special format.
It's basically year and then dash and then month dash and day. A lot of people like to put zeros
in front of those to make it look like a proper Julian date. Now I'm only going to get results
that are synced to June 1st of this year. I can leave off the day if I want it to be before the
first of that month. You could do the same thing with before. So if you wanted to find really old
results you could do something like that. You could also use both before and after
in the same search results to find something in a very specific range.
Now you can use Boolean Operators OR and AND but you have to use them in capital letters
else it's going to think they are a regular word you're searching for. So, for instance, let's say
I wanted to search for an xbox and I want it to look just on Amazon. I could do that. But
I could also do OR and then site:bestbuy. Now all of my results are going to be either Best Buy or
Amazon results. You could always use parentheses as well. Parentheses will group something together
like that to make sure Goggle understands exactly what you want. Here's another example. Do intitle
and then how to and then I'll put in parentheses knit OR crochet a blanket.
A more obscure search operator is Around. So you could do something like
knitting and then AROUND, it has to be in all caps, and then tutorial. What this will say is
knitting and tutorial need to be within two words of each other.
Of course that's looking everywhere. In titles and the body. So let's do intitle and now you
could see knitting and tutorials either together or in some cases it's separated but within two.
Another useful tip that I use all the time is not to worry about spelling. Goggle will figure
out what you're trying to spell. Just spell it as best you can and usually Goggle can figure it out.
So if I'm looking for information about this star and I can't remember the right way to spell it
I just do that and you could see it's going to say Show Results for and give me the right spelling.
I didn't have to waste time to actually look up the proper spelling
first. I can always click there and change the actual search if I want to.
Here's another one. There's a special search operator called Related
and what this does is you give it a website and it will show websites that Goggle things are related
to it. So, for instance, if you want to look up encyclopedia information and you can't think of
where else besides Wikipedia you can go, you can do Related and do Wikipedia.org and you're
going to get results that show you other sites that may have information similar to Wikipedia.
Now beyond what you can type there are a ton of tools that you can access after you do the
search. So, of course, at the top you can narrow down by type. I can look at just Videos or just
Shopping Items or just News. There's more here and you can go and say Finance or just Images.
You also can click Tools and then depending upon the results you'll find different things here.
The most useful is Any time. So instead of using Before and After you could actually go here
and do things like Past Week or Past Month which are really useful especially as a programmer
and you're looking at different versions of programming languages, I want results that
are in the last year most of the time. So I'll do the search and then go and modify with Past Year.
Finally if you really want to do a powerful search, instead of just going to Goggle,
go to Goggle.com/advanced_search. Then you get this page. This page allows you to do
a lot of the things I just showed you but without having to remember what to type.
So you can fill all of this stuff out and do a very specific search even things I haven't talked
about. Like by region or language or numbers ranging from one thing to the other. For instance,
prices or weights or years. Things like that. You can even search by file type. All sorts of things.
So Advanced Search is really the place to go if you want to dig down
and find information online. Don't just start with the regular Goggle page. Go here.
So there are a whole bunch of tips but by no means everything Goggle can do.
If there's a favorite search technique that you use that I haven't covered mention it in
the comments below. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.