How to get better results when searching Google

Back in 1996, two students at the Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, built a search engine for web pages that they named Backrub. Backrub used the quality and the quantity of the links pointing towards a page to decide on the importance and the relevance of that specific page. By 1998, they had formalised their work and Google was born. Google Search turned out to be a remarkable success and even today Google Search has more than 60% of the market share.

There are better ways than the simple search

Agreed that the simple search itself is good enough to lead most people to where they want to go or what they want to find, but with the advanced search feature and the other special features available in the search, one can make their search much faster, effective and efficient. Below you can find some tips and tricks to make your Google Search experience better.

Search Options – A more effective way of searching

When you search for a specific term, a navigation bar appears on the left hand side of the page with the following tabs: Everything, Images, Videos, News, Blogs and More; with the tab “Everything” highlighted in red.

This means that the search result for your query contains all kinds of content (images, news, videos, blogs etc.) available online. Now, you can further narrow down your search results as per your requirement by using the appropriate filters provided in the form of the tabs mentioned above.

For example, if you are searching for something specific, like maybe only the latest news items about “Keira Knightley”, then all you need to do is click on the “News” tab to get all the latest news from all over the web, which can be further sorted out according to the time frame as, Anytime, Past hour, Past 24 hours, Past week or month etc. You can also choose if you want to search pages from the whole web or pages only from your country (only if you are on a country specific home page.)

How to best filter your results

Similarly, one can search through “Images”, “Videos” or “Blogs” by using the tabs provided on the left side bar. There are a number of filters available and if you click on the “More” tab you get to see additional filters like: shopping, books, places, discussions and patents. You can also choose any of these options to filter the search results. Please remember that there are even more options available and what you see is just what the search engine considers relevant to the topic you are searching for. We will now discuss all the options available to us to filter our results.

• Everything: Your Google Search will show you unfiltered results, by default, which will show all kinds of content.

• Images: If you select the Images filter, you will get results for images based on your search query. Most users are aware that they can search for images by typing in words or phrases in the search bar. However, it is also possible to search for images using an Image URL or by uploading an image. When you are looking for images you can either filter the results after searching everything or you can directly go to the Image Search by clicking on the Images tab on the top bar of the Google home page. Either ways you will see a camera icon in the search bar on the right side.

• News: If you select this filter you will see results from Google news only. This does not mean that Google is running a news agency. Google aggregates news from various sources and presents them to the user. An interesting feature about the Google news is that you can create alerts for your search topic. If you create an alert, Google will notify you (by email) about any fresh content about your search expression, as it is found in real time.

• Books: This filter will give you the results for books on your search expression. So if you are looking for recipes, you will get a list of books with Recipes as the theme. You will also be able to preview the book and see any reviews, which are there. In addition, if the information is available, you will be able to see the vendors/stores that are selling the book.

• Videos: If you would like to see only videos on the topic you are interested in, then you can use the Video filter. Again the videos that are displayed as search results could be Google videos or from any other website.

• Blogs: The Blogs filter focuses on blog search. If you want to see what people are saying about a specific topic you are interested in, then blogs filter is the right choice as it is generally individuals who maintain blogs. Even though the blog search includes results in all languages (by default), you can use the advanced search feature to restrict the results to a language of your choice.

• Places: By using this filter you can restrict the search results to only those from Google places. Remember that only those places, which are listed or are important enough, will be presented. So, if you type in your name and expect your address to be shown, it won’t happen.

• Shopping: The shopping filter shows results from the Google product search. It helps you find online stores containing your query product and also compares the products and their prices.

• Discussions: The Discussion filter provides results from Groups, Forums and Question & Answers sites.

Good luck searching the web!

If you want to delve further into the different tools Google provides, take a look at “Google Beyond google” written by Varinder Taprial and Priya Kanwar.

Download the free eBook “Google Beyond google”