Google Guide

Google is damn useful.

Here are some google tips

By using certain keywords followed by a semi-colon, Google can do certain tricks!

• “Define:” Will define a word you type afterwards. e.g. define:tree

• “Site:” Will search for your search words on a specific site. e.g. site:google.com advanced search

• “OR” This word is useful for a specific search which could use different words, e.g. ‘Dave OR David Schwimmer’

• “*” This is a wildcard and can stand in place of any word. (see Wildcard search lower down).

• “~” This is for a synonym search, use with a word like ~help and google also looks for synonyms such as ‘FAQ’ and ‘Tutorial’.

Using the wildcard (*) allows google to ‘fill in a blank’. To use it, imagine the perfect answer to your question but replace the parts you don’t know with *.

The first result when using this search was ‘Coronation Street’, which is the correct answer.

The asterisk wildcard can also be used for proximity searching. For example, searching for a restaurant called ‘rules’ in Newcastle, the query:

rules ****** (newcastle OR restaurant)

will only return hits where the word “rules” is within 6 words of “newcastle” or “restaurant”, to cut down on the number of irrelevant hits. You can control the number of words in this proximity by the number of asterisks, e.g.

train ********** ("london" *** "brighton")

…will only return hits where London and Brighton are within 3 words of each other, and the word train (or trains) is within 10 words (i.e. a sentence) of London and Brighton.

You can even then take this much further to pick up only good hits about, say, GM foods:

("food" OR "trial" OR "plant" OR "crop") ****** ("gm" OR "gmo" OR "gmos" OR "genetically
modified" OR "genetic modification" OR "genetically engineered"
OR "genetic engineering")

Note: Google will automatically accomodate plurals etc, so no ‘OR’ is needed for train OR trains, just use one..

Also the word replacement is reported to work for a maximum of 10 words.

• http://www.google.co.uk
• http://maps.google.co.uk
• http://local.google.co.uk