Weekly Tip #5: Effective Google Searching

By now, there aren't many internet users who haven't heard of Google. Google is the top ranked search engine on the planet at this point in time.

However, most people don't use the advanced search and information finding features that google offers.

This week we'll review some of the features of Google that make everyday activities easier.

1. Site Search (site:)

Let's say you have a Dell notebook and you want to find out the specifications of your notebook (for example, I have a Dell Inspiron 6400).

You can specify a search that only searches the Dell website like this:

Dell Inspiron 6400 specifications site:www.dell.com

Which gives these results: Here

As you can see, only pages on www.dell.com are returned as results.

2. Currency Conversion

If you deal in foreign currencies, you may have a good site already, like www.oanda.com. But google can give you quick conversions by doing a search like this:

1USD to CAD

Which returns the results Here

The important thing to remember is to put the number of dollars (or whatever currency) as the first currency, then put "to " to complete the search.

3. Measurement conversion

With google you can convert metric to imperial, or vice versa, much like the currency converter.

This search:

565 litres to gallons

results in this: Here

4. Stock Quotes

Google search also has a built in stock quote function. Currently it only works for stocks on the US stock exchanges.

For example if you search:
RIMM

You get stock quote for Research in Motion on the NASDAQ: Here

5. File Type search

This one is particularly useful. Let's say you're looking for information about cookbooks, but you want cookbooks that are in PDF or Word Document format. You can narrow your search by defining the filetype like this:

cookbook filetype:PDF

Which gives the results: Here


As you can see, Google has done a great job making common everyday queries easy and accessible to even novice search users. These functions can even be combined. Let's say I want to search for PDF files related to my dell 6400 on the dell site. I would do this search:

Dell Inspiron 6400 filetype:PDF site:www.dell.com

This would return results of all the PDF files about the Inspiron 6400 on dell's web site.

For a full list of features and advanced search abilities of Google, check out this page: http://www.google.ca/intl/en/help/features.html

That's all for this time.

Regards,
Ben