Google is damn useful.
Here are some google tips
By using certain keywords followed by a semi-colon, Google can do certain tricks!
~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 *.
| Question | Ideal answer, typed into google |
|---|---|
| What is the longest running TV show in britain? | * is the longest running TV show OR program in Britain OR England |
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.