Becoming a Google Search Expert


  Google Search Tips and Tricks

Here are a few tricks you can implement into your Google searches to help narrow and improve the results you get!

Google:

# Search Trick Explanation
1 Quotations "

This narrows the search to that specific phrase only.
If you were to google John Doe. You might get results for people with the first name John or people with the last name Doe, but not the proper first name. If you googled "John Doe" it would only show results that have the full name.
2 Dash -search Add a dash before a word to exclude a search term. If you were to google the word inception, you would get a ton of results about the movie, but if you were to google inception -movie, it would exclude anything movie related to that word.
3 Two periods for number ranges ..
Separate numbers with two periods to see results that contain numbers in a given range. i.e. teacher gifts $10..$50
4 filetype:suffix
Typing filetype: and then a file type will limit the search to results that contain that specific file type. So if I were to search Canvas filetype:pdf, the results would contain links to PDFs only.
5 Use a colon to search specific sites :

The syntax is very simple. For example:

Technology site:wayzataschools.org

This will search for all content about Technology, but only on wayzataschools.org. All other results would be removed.