The Advantage of Google’s Advanced Search

I met with a gentleman today who was telling me he was dissatisfied with his web searches – he was coming up empty.

I recently went looking on eWeek’s website for a privacy article I read earlier in their magazine. My searches kept coming up empty as well. eWeek’s own search wasn’t working at the time or something. (It’s working now). Determined to find this article, I remembered you can search someone else’s website using Google. I searched from Google and I found the article.

Which leads me to the point of this post.

If you’re not getting the search results you want, maybe you’re not utilizing Google (and other search engines) to its fullest.

Take a look at Google’s Advanced Search features.

• Search someone else’s website – Typing in “eWeek.com” under “Domain” and entering in my keywords under “Find Results”, Google was able to find the article.
• Exclude words from your search – Add a minus (-) sign before words you don’t want in your search. I use this feature when I see many duplicate results after a search. By eliminating these duplicates you can increase your chances of finding what you want.
• Up to date searches – A lot of times when I want to search for the latest news or recent web articles, I’ll search for web pages updated in the last “3 Months” under “Date”.

Google has made searching cool and popular. They get it right most of the time, but sometimes Google needs some help from us. Google can only produce the results you tell it. You’ve heard the saying, “You get what you put into it”.

Here are some more ways to utilize Google’s Advanced Search.

Mike Swartz says, “Check it out.”