Six tips to improve your Google experience

Google is a very powerful search engine. Although it is smart enough to provide the best results for your search, there are times when you need to be more specific. To allow this, Google provides a set of keywords that you can use to use to improve your search results.

Google commands generally have the form "command:search terms", where "command" is a single word and "search terms" are the keywords you want to search. We show bellow a set of the most useful commands and tips for their correct use. Employing these tips, you will certainly become much more productive in your Google searches:

  • Finding related content: Google allows you to find not only pages related to a keyword, but also pages related to another page. For example, suppose you want all pages related to the Digg website. You just need to type related:Digg.com. Google will try to find the sites that best match the content on that page.
  • Finding the definition of a word: Sometimes you may just want to find the meaning of word or expression. In this case, you don't need to run a full search, just type define:word, and you will get the definition (usually as an answer.com window)
  • Find links to a page: if you want to see who is linking to your web page, the easiest method is to use the operator link. If you enter link:url into the search box (where url is the link you want to investigate), you will see all pages that Google find with links to the URL you specified.
  • Searching inside a website: In many situations you don't want to search the whole web for a term; you known already the web site where it is contained. A example of this is when you are looking for a piece of information in the web page of your company or university. To perform this kind of search, you need the operator "site:". For example, if you add to your search the term site:ibm.com this means that you want to find only pages that are in the IBM website.
  • Searching in page titles: If the information you are looking for is too specific, maybe the best strategy is to search for pages where the keyword is in the page title itself. By doing this you restrict your search to a small number of sites directly related to the term. You can do exactly this by adding the operator "allintitle:" to your query. If you want to find just one keyword in the titles you may use the simpler version "intitle:", where the next word must be the single word you are looking for.
  • Searching in the URL: you can do the same trick with the URL instead of the page title. If you want to search only one keyword, use the "inurl:" form. If you want two or more words in the url, use the "allinurl:" form.
The Google search website has very powerful features that must people don't know. If you start with the tips we give above, you will notice that your search results will become much more accurate. You will also start to learn different search strategies that can be adapted according to the content you wish to find.

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