Google: Know Me Better!
Introduction:
If you google anything and if it’s not found, in the first or few more searches, concluding that the result does not exist on the internet will be the silliest mistake of yours.
After having any new idea/thought, the immediate question that you should have is: “Is its solution already there on the internet?” And to find that, of course, you need to “Search” everywhere possible, in any format.
Now, it is not that easy to retrieve the solution to your question in just one google search, especially when your niche of research is too narrow. You need to try out different keywords, and phrases, keep your subject line a bit broad in the beginning and then try to go towards your niche/subject line.
To do so, you first need to know “How to effectively search on the Internet”.
Imagine an open-book exam. There’s a question asked that you are clueless about but there is a book to refer to. In this case, you should have the knowledge and understanding about “how to search” the book.
This is an important skill that you can be paid for. I.e How to retrieve correct knowledge or data, called “Research Skills”.
Here are some of the tips and tricks you can follow to effectively search on the internet.
Operators you can use:
1) Use quotation marks: “ ”: It will only give you results that exactly match the quoted words in order.
Eg:
2) Use “ | ” or an “or” operator. It indicates “Either this or that”. It works when the user is unsure of the information that he/she wants to retrieve.
Eg: If the user is confused about his/her search intent between “Data Science” and “Data Analyst”, the following will be the search query and Google will give information related to both the searched terms.
3) Suppose you are not sure between any 2 products to buy, and you want to compare the products with price parameters. You can use “buy cheap” and then products.
Eg:
4) If you have forgotten the main search word or the keyword, using an asterisk “ * ” in the place of the keyword will give you all variations in your search results. I.e it will give you all the possible combinations of the missing word (replaced by an asterisk) possible.
Eg:
OR
5) If you forgot most of the words in a sentence, then try the following:
Write the First and Last words and put “AROUND + (the approximate number of missing words)”.
E.g:
6) If you don’t want to type the whole sentence, e.g: “Exercise for arm fat”, you can also use the tilde (~) sign between the 2 keywords.
E.g:
7) If you want to find out the exact terms in the title or if you are searching for a particular article that has a specific phrase in it, you can use the “intitle” keyword.
(If you are searching in URL: “inurl:”)
E.g:
8) If you want to search for some related websites of your favorite domain or if you want to search for some competitors in your domain, try the following:
“related: name of the website”.
E.g:
9) To know the meaning of slang or acronyms or word meanings:
Syntax: define:word/slang/acronym.
E.g:
To know the origin of the word:
Syntax: etymology:. Word
10) If you are clear with your search intent and don’t want a particular type to appear, you can use minus sign (-)
E.g: Food options -sushi
Note: The above-mentioned search techniques are the most used search techniques. There are various methods which are there other than the ones mentioned above
Some other gyaan that is v.imp:
- Vary your search engines. This will help to compare your results.
- Share this article!
- Use particular keywords that are specific to your niche/search intent.
- Exclude the terms that are strictly not required.
- Always know the difference between the paid result and organic results.
- Organic results are difficult to rank on google and hence, they may have some more valuable information than paid results.
- How can you do that?
- Again, as mentioned above in the 1st point, if you have different sources of your results/articles, you will be able to compare and there will be factual information that will be identical.
- Before trusting the article, know its author, research its author, and check whether he/she is eligible to give the knowledge or opinions or not.
- Use Niche based search engines:
- E.g: Food: Zomato, swiggy, dominos
- Clothes: Myntra, Amazon, Flipkart
- Google Scholar
- ResearchGate: for research papers
- .edu sites for educational purposes.
I am grateful to you for having such patience to read the article till here, and I am quite sure that you must have gained some valuable information reading this article. If you have, then please share it with your friends and family members. #shareknowledge.
Stay curious and tuned for such articles from my side.
Cheers,
Aanal
References:
https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/internet-searching.htm
https://humboldtgov.org/228/Search-the-Internet-Internet-Help
https://moz.com/learn/seo/search-operators
https://perishablepress.com/sharpen-your-google-search-skills/
https://www.uopeople.edu/blog/the-best-research-skills-for-success/ https://www.legitquest.com/legal-guide/7-ways-to-enhance-your-legal-research-skills
