Tip of the Week – Improve Your Google Search Results

As promised in the last edition here are some examples on using “*” as well as the “site:” operator.

The “*” is known as a wild card in searching. Use “*” to match one or more words in a phrase (enclosed in quotes).  For example,  “Google * my life”  tells Google to find pages containing a phrase that starts with “Google” followed by one or more words, followed by “my life”.  Phrases that fit the bill include : “Google changed by life”, “Google is my life” and “Google helps me with my life”.  Can you see yourself using this when you’re not sure of the exact title of a book, or the entire adage you are trying to recall, or someone’s full name?

The operator called “site:” is used to when you only want results from certain sites or domains.  Likewise with the  “–site:”,  you can exclude a particular site or domain.  Some examples,    “James Brown” site:ancestry.com  or  “James Brown” site:familysearch.org   tells Google  find me all the James Brown pages in Ancestry.com or all the James Brown pages in Familysearch.org, respectively.  Likewise, “James Brown” –site:Youtube.com  says find me all pages for James Brown, but ignore any at Youtube.com

Don’t worry about memorizing the syntax for every operator or punctuation we’ve discussed because you can also use the Advanced Search page to create these searches.   If you search often, try adding advanced search to your favorites:   https://www.google.com/advanced_search