Tips and tricks for better Internet searching.

Though your high school English teachers’ toes may twist, the vein on her forehead might pulsate and her blood pressure rise, its now globally accepted that where once Google was a noun it is now a more often than not used as a verb.

Need to find out the air speed velocity of a unladen swallow, Google it.

Need to find out the what the capital of Assyria is, Google it.

Supreme executive power derived from a mandate of the masses or from some farcical aquatic ceremony? Google it.

However, it seems that as days go by and technology makes ever increasing leaps towards judgment day (Not referring to those wacky fire and brimstone revelations ), I’m thinking more along the lines of Skynet.

It seems that most people do not know how to search correctly or should I dare say efficiently. Though Google does generally find what you are looking for somewhere between the first and third page of search results, being able to refine and prioritize your searches is a must in todays information overload.

Allow Tech Noir to show you the ropes.

To get a better understanding on what you are doing, I have hyper linked some the examples, so that you can see what difference the tips make.

Search for a phrase.

Add “ “ to search for an exact phrase, using quotation marks around the text you are looking for.

Example: “In the town where I was born”.

This is good for people’s names, quotations, song lyrics and other situations where you want to ensure that words appear next to each other on the page.

Search including a word

+ use a plus sign for words that must be included in you search results.

Example: Nascar Car + Ricky Bobby

Search excluding a word

- Use a minus sign for words that MUST NOT be included in the results.

Example: Nelson Mandela Metro -university
This would give you a list of websites about the Nelson Mandela Metro but remove all the sites about the university.

Domain searches

domain: Use this term to search only within a particular website, or type of website

Example 1: Appletart :iol.co.za
This will return pages offering appletart recipes on the iol.co.za

Example 2: Reservists:saps.gov.za
This will return pages offering pension information from government websites.

-domain: Use a minus sign to exclude a domain from your search.

Example: iraq -domain:www.bbcnews.co.uk
This will return information about Iraq, but exclude any information from the BBC site.

Regional searches

There are nine geographic regions you can use to narrow your search:

• Africa

• Centralamerica

• Downunder

• Europe

• Mediterranean

• Mideast

• Northamerica

• Southamerica

• Southeastasia

region: Use this to search for a document from a particular geographic area.

Example: Springboks region:New Zealand
This will return sites from the Middle East offering information about Tony Blair

-region: Add the minus sign to exclude documents from a particular region.

Example: Bull Blues -region:New Zealand
This will return sites about Tony Blair, excluding those from the Middle East.

“OR” search

To find pages that include either of two search terms, add an uppercase OR between the terms.

For example, here’s how to search for a vacation in either London or Paris. Vacation London or Paris

Convert currency, metrics, bytes, and more

Google’s powerful built-in converter calculator can help you out whether you’re cooking dinner, traveling abroad, or building a PC. Find out how many teaspoons are in a quarter cup (quarter cup in teaspoons) or how many seconds there are in a year (seconds in a year) or how many euros there are to five hundred thousand Rand (500000 rand in euro). For the geekier set, bits in kilobytes (155473 bytes in kilobytes) and numbers in hex or binary (19 in binary) are also pretty useful.

Make Google recognize faces

If you’re doing an image search for Paris Hilton and don’t want any of the French city, a special URL parameter in Google’s Image search will do the trick. Add &imgtype=face to the end of your image search to just get images of faces, without any inanimate objects. Try it out with a search for rose (which returns many photos of flowers) versus rose with the face parameter.

For the best results, I would recommend using a number of these techniques together.

Now you didn’t get this from me, but… CLICK CLICK

Tell next time, this is Tech Noir.