Tag: Search

Today, a couple quick tips on getting extra picky on what results you want your search engine to return. You can use plus and minus signs before search terms to instruct your search engine of choice to either weight results in favour of pages that include specific words/phrases, or to tell it to disregard pages that include certain words/phrases. This is particularly useful if you’re searching for terms that appear frequently in different contexts, as it lets you filter the results to better match the context you want.

The minus sign (-)

This lets you tell the search engine to specifically exclude search results with that particular word.

Say I’ve forgotten the significance of zig zag road markings, so google for the search term zig zag:

Lots of results on the erstwhile RTE celeb puppets and American child stars, but nothing on roads.

I’ll try filtering the puppets out and see if I do any better. This time, my search pattern is zig zag -rte.

Getting better, but still not there. Time to try something new.

The plus sign (+)

You can ask the search engine to weight results to favour ones that include one or more specific words by pre-fixing them with a plus sign (+).

I’ll try searching for zig zags again, but this time I’m specifically looking for the painted white lines, and my new search pattern is zig zag +white +line:

Bingo!

Now that my question is answered, I think I’ll hit Back a couple of times and indulge in some youth-recapturing with the guys from Zog. 🙂

This is a Google-specific trick. If you have a piece of information in one frame of reference, but want to know it in another, you can ask Google if it knows the answer, and chances are it will.

To do this, enter the search pattern “X in Y”, where X is the piece of information you have (for example a weight), and Y is the unit or format you want the information in. For example, “4kg in oz”, “3m in feet”, or “2 pints in litres”. Very useful in this part of the world where mixed usage of metric and imperial units is common.

Better yet, this trick also works for less obvious stuff like currency conversion.

Google’s documentation of this feature is delightfully vague, so I’m only discovering what this feature can do by trial and error. If you figure out something particularly nifty it can convert, please comment below and share the wisdom.

Over the years, I’ve picked up a few search engine tips and tricks which I tend to take for granted until I chat to someone who doesn’t know about them, so I’m going to stick a few of them into blog posts to share. Maybe you’ll already know about them, maybe you won’t. Hopefully they’ll prove useful or entertaining anyway.

Tip Number One: Using Stop Words

Stop words are words that search engines usually disregard because they’re so common. They do, however, register where stop words occur in text patterns. This allows you to do some nifty things if you’re searching for something, but you’re slightly fuzzy on the precise details.

For example, say I’m trying to track down a certain children’s rhyme but I can only half remember it from my distant youth: “Round and round the something, like a something something.” If I enter that pattern into Google, it’ll look for that string of text with the word “something”, fail, and revert to searching for pages with frequent occurrences of the words in the query in any order. The phrase I’m looking for doesn’t show up in the first several pages of results, so I give up and try again.

This time, instead of the “something”s I use a stop word (“the” is an easy one to remember), so my search pattern becomes “Round and round the the, like a the the”. Now Google ignores the actual word “the”, but acknowledges that I’m looking for a pattern with a word in that position, and the search results turn into:

Bingo! Result number 3 is the rhyme from my youth that I loved so well.

Wildcards

If you’re the type that’s into using wildcards, for this particular search the * character (representing “zero or more characters”) actually gets better results faster. However, the * character could match more than one word in the specified position, or even match no words. Either ways, searching with a stop word, or searching with a wildcard, can turn up different results, so it’s worth giving both methods a go if you’re hitting dead ends searching for what you’re after.