Everyday we depend on Google to organize the world’s information. In most situation you can put in any term and the search-engine will find it. This might be called the shotgun method. You get results for all of the words in the quire. That said, Google is not a human and can doesn’t understand context, and common usage.

Categories

On the Google search home page they give you several categories that can assist you in your quire. You can easily search images, news books, videos, maps, shopping, flights, and and finance.

Tools

Tools, there under the search box give you some time based options like:

• Any Duration
• From the 0-4 minutes,
• From the last 4-20 minutes,
• From 20 minutes+,
• Anytime
• Past hour
• Past 24 hours
• Any Results
• Verbatim (only the exact quire,

Search Exact Term

Quotation marks, will focus the search to that exact term. Example: hotdog bun, will search for the word hot, the word dog, and the word bun. This will probably get you the you what you need but it will also include results that include hot by itself, dog by itself, and others with bun by itself. To get results that are only pages with hot dog bun together use quotation marks around the term. Example: “hot dog bun”. All the pages in the results will pertain to the type of bread we tend to put those popular sausages on.

Search A Specific Site

Use the word site then a semicolon, followed by the site URL will give you results from that site only. Example: site:gnfmeetup.org will search only this site.

Search Social Media

Put an @ sign in front of a search term Google will search social media sites for you. Example: @the walking dead will get you results from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.

Asterisk As A Wildcard

Use an asterisk in place of words you can’t remember. Example: I’ll never * in * again will get results for the song written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, performed by Dionne Worwick, Tom Jones and countless others.

All of these text base advanced search tools are called Google advanced search operators. Here’s a list of operators.

Advaned Search Page

Google Advance Search page does many of the thing that the short do but in a GUI (graphical user interface) form. There use to be linked to Advanced search on search homepage but not any longer.