One of the things I love about Google is its clean layout – just type your query and hit enter. As well as the advanced search function, there are a load of operator hacks you can use to refine your search results. Check out the excellent Google Guide for a full list.
Here is a selection of some useful ones:
- salsa -dance will find pages containing “salsa” but not “dance”
- castle ~glossary will find pages containing glossaries and terminology related to “castle”
- define:matador will bring up definitions of the word “matador”
- ~crocodile will search for the word “crocodile” and similar words
- lon sfo to book flights from London to San Francisco
- delta flight 5778 to check the status of this flight
- what time is it in New York to find out the time in this city
- love site:www.mysite.com/life to search only Mysite Life for the word “love”
- love -site:www.mysite.com/life to exclude Mysite Life results from your search for “love”
And don’t forget if you want to visit a site that is down, or that your company’s server won’t let you access, you can view the Cached version to see a Google snapshot of that page from when it was last crawled.
