GOOGLE is part of our daily lives – but are you using it properly?
There are some hidden hacks to get even more out of your searches.
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So often you’ll search something, only to find you’re not getting exactly what you’d hoped for.
What you need to do is Operators – these affect how Google “reads” your searches.
Two key Operators were shared in a popular clip from TikTok creator @ellyawesometech.
In that video, Elly reveals how you can put a minus symbol just before a word (in direct contact, with no space) to remove it from a Google Search.
For instance, if you wanted to read about Alexander Hamilton but not the musical, you could search: Alexander Hamilton -musical -broadway
This would tell Google to not show search results with those terms in.
Another hack is to use quotation marks to find exact results on phrases.
For instance, you might search for bean burgers, and get results for other types of burgers too.
But if you search “bean burgers”, Google hunts for that exact phrase – honing your search significantly.
You can also remove entire phrases using the minus symbol and quotations by combining the above methods.
Elly only shared two Google Operators in her viral clip, but there are loads you can try.
Other Google Operators to try
There are lots of Operators to use on Google.
Typing intitle: will let you find pages with the words in the title.
Similarly, allintitle: will only show results with all of the words in the title.
You can use inurl: and allinurl: to similar effect for the URL.
Using the around(x) Operator will make sure that your search terms are now more than “x” words apart on the page.
You can use the site:insertURL.com Operator to search on a specific website.
And you can combine an OR Operator and brackets to combine search terms, like so: (blueberry OR banana) muffin
It’s also possible to swap OR for AND to make sure you get both terms in your results.
Finally, you can specify results using filetype:, so you could hunt for a PDF or JPG.
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