if you use Google today is your lucky day because I'm about to revolutionize how you search for things by showing you the top 12 ways that you can make your Google searching faster and far more effective and I'm not talking about just using that advanced tab I mean truly powerful searches we'll cover search tags file types domain searches Boolean operators and a great deal more once you know them I'm sure you'll agree that some of these tips are so effective that you'll wonder how you ever found anything without them I'll run down the full top 12 list right here today in Dave's [Music] Garage hey I'm Dave welcome to my shop as we look at the top 12 ways to make your searching more effective you might begin to wonder how you can improve on the already excellent results that Google gives you today well the answer can be found in the fact that most of what we do here today is not to find more results because Google already has that part down pat and if you're looking for the most popular result associated with a common phrase like chocolate chip cookies they have you covered there as well what we'll be primarily doing today is exploring how to make your searches far more precise and selective it's not about finding more information it's about finding the right information the first time number 12 quoted searches quoted searches are the very first technique you should Master when you put a set of words in quotation marks like John Quincy Adams you get only results that contain that exact name or phrase you would not see any hits for just John Adams if on the other hand you didn't quote it Google is likely smart enough to find you the top results but they could still include any pages that mention John Adams without regard to which one you were talking about other examples might include Martin Luther versus Martin Luther King and George W bush versus George HW Bush by using quotation marks you ensure that the results you get back include the exact phrase that you specify now quoted searches are especially powerful when searching for direct quotes or passages of text because they will match only that exact set of words in that order whereas unquoted search can return any page that includes the words in any order or even just a subset of them sometimes with quotation marks It's All or Nothing number 11 the minus operator using the minus operator allows you to specify that you only want pages that do not contain the word or phrase that you indicate for example if you want recipes for chocolate chip cookies that make no mention of peanuts or peanut butter you could search for peanut butter cookies and then add minus peanut the results you get to exclude anything that mentions peanuts you can also exclude whole phrases for example if you weren't worried about peanuts themselves but you still wanted to exclude any pages that made reference to peanut butter you could search for peanut butter cookies minus and in quotes peanut butter where peanut butter is as I said quoted and preceded by the minus sign that will still allow pages that include the word peanut by itself but exclude any that make mention of peanut butter number 10 sight search have you ever been using a website that had its own search box for finding stuff on that site but where their search was terrible and you knew for sure that if you could just use Google search on that site instead it would likely find what you needed quickly well the good news is that you can do just that and it's super easy you simply specify site colon and the domain name you want to search followed by whatever it is that you're actually looking for let's say I want to find a user profile on GitHub rather than going to GitHub and navigating around to it I can simply enter a search that restricts the results to pages on GitHub follow follow by the profile name and so if I enter site github.com SP DPL the first hit will be my profile page on GitHub this technique is especially useful even when the basic search works on a website because it allows you to employ most everything we learn here today on any specific website for example you can combine the site tag with any powerful Google search and the net result is that you can use everything in Google's expressive search grammar to narrowly search any particular website why would you do such a thing well here are just a few examples Wikipedia has thousands if not millions of Articles and you can rest assured they've all been indexed by Google so if you're doing research or anything that requires more than just basic keyword searches do it with Google instead Reddit has a notoriously poor search and I think you'll be way ahead of the game if you use Google to search Reddit instead just put site and reddit.com in front of whatever it is that you want to find on their site Amazon has a bajillion products but many of the search results are sponsored and the content match to system has a habit of giving you a cornicopia of results that almost match what you're looking for but not quite let's say you're looking for 24 volt individually addressable LED strips if we enter that search into Amazon itself the first four results are sponsored results that include a mix of 12 and 5 volt strips but no 24 volt strips at all the fifth strip shown is 24 volts thankfully but the very next one is 5 volts again so as much as I love Amazon their search seems a little too eager to get you to buy something anything rather than nothing and I've made the mistake once or twice of just assuming that the top search results would match the criteria that I specified when I didn't If instead I searched using siteco on amazon.com 24v individually addressable LED strip the results are now actually 24 volts in most of the cases but what if I want to make absolutely sure that the pages reference 24 volts I can specify 24v LED strip in quotes but that's a little too specific many pages related to 24 volt LED strips may not have that exact phrase so how do we do it we do it with a plus operator our next tip number nine the plus operator when you want to make absitively positively sure that a search term appears on the pages that form your results all you need to do is to prefix that term with a plus sign thus in our LED example we would search Amazon as follows site colon amazon.com plus 24v LED strip when we run that query sure enough every single result includes 24 V now it's also possible that one of the results is a page that includes a phrase does not support 24v but that's sort of an edge case and you still need to vet any results to confirm that they do indeed match your criteria let's say that you want to search Wikipedia for articles about Egypt but only ancient Egypt you could simply search for sitecon Wikipedia.org plus ancient plus Egypt that means the results must come from the Wikipedia site and they must contain the words ancient and Egypt but not in any particular order or relative proximity if that's actually what you wanted to do find pages that must contain the phrase ancient Egypt you could quote it and put a plus operator in front of the phrase and that would ensure that you only get pages from Wikipedia that have the exact phrase ancient Egypt number eight The Ore operator what if we wanted to find pages about either of Two Towns let's say we want information on both humble and melord Saskatchewan yeah I'm from ckat what's up in Canada e which is to say we want to find pages that include the word saskatch at least one of either humble or Melfort we write the simple search as Saskatchewan Melfort or humble with the only caveat being that you have to use uppercase on the or operator if you prefer you can also use the vertical pipe operator instead the or operator can be especially helpful in cases where you want to expand rather than restrict the scope of a search for example you might use the or operator to search for information when you're not quite sure which words best describe it there are also cases where two or more words relate to the same thing but perhaps one is plural and so you could write Buffalo or bison to search for pages that include either word form there are cases such as bicycle or bike where the words are different enough that you'll want to include both as another example perhaps you're researching cell phone plans well you'll be further ahead if you search for smartphone or cell phone or mobile phone as it will have a much broader reach one of the more powerful techniques is to First broaden a search and then narrow it down by combining terms let's say we want to search for vanilla or chocolate cake the problem here is that it won't do what we want instead we're turning pages that contain the word vanilla anywhere or chocolate cake anywhere but not vanilla cake to do that we need another feature bonus the and operator when you want to be very selective about the pages that are returned you can use the and operator to ensure that both sides of the term are included you could for example search for minus tokat and and and then in parenthesis humbled or melord which would return pages that do not include Saskatchewan but that do include at least one of humbl or melord it seems to me that anything you can do with the and operator can likely be done with the parenthesis and the plus operator if you can think of something that can only be done with the and operator let me know in the comments until then though we'll just consider the and operator to be a bonus tip number seven parentheses using parentheses in our searches allows us to be very specific about our intent in our vanilla or chocolate cake example what we really want wanted to search for was pages that contained vanilla cake or chocolate cake you could write that out fully like that but there's a more elegant way we use parentheses to rewrite the search as in parenthesis vanilla or chocolate and then cake the use of parentheses also enables much more complex scenarios let's say I'm looking for William H Gates on the internet I might write that as in quotes in parenthesis Bill or William and parenthesis Gates and quotes minus senior easier to look on the screen if you're not on a podcast in this case I'm looking for pages that contain the exact phrase Bill Gates or William Gates and those pages should not contain senior because that would be his dad and not him as you can see it appears the parenthesis and the Boolean operators function well within a quoted phrase and that's a mechanism that can be used to perform searches with great Precision another example consider searching for in parenthesis grer red and then in parenthesis wolf or Fox which will return any of the four combinations grey wolf red wolf gray fox and red fox number six searching from the URL bar all Sor you already know that as long as Google is configured as your default search engine you can enter searches right into the URL bar without going to google.com first if not that's the biggest news of the day but as the most basic example if I type banana into the URL bar and press enter it does not go to banana.com but rather it searches for the term banana using Google if you did want it to go to banana.com hold down control and hit enter and it just add.com for you don't thank me send money what you may not be aware of is that everything we've learned here so far can also be entered directly into the URL bar if you enter apple or orange in parenthesis followed by juice you'll immediately get back pages that include apple juice or orange juice you can also use quotation marks to firm up those requests the one thing that sometimes gets in my way however is actually a feature and not a bug it's called domain searching and we'll check it out next number five domain searching for a number of well-known public websites like Amazon in YouTube you can run a search right from the URL bar just by typing the property name into the address bar as an example watch what happens when I simply type Amazon into the URL bar the input box suddenly changes slightly to reflect that my search will only be run on Amazon you could accomplish the same thing with the site tag that we learned earlier but this is a simple shortcut for people that don't know the grammar if you're looking for the year's best fail videos on YouTube you'd start up by entering the word YouTube which switches the search context from the entire web to just YouTube itself and then whatever you have to enter next is executed as your actual search query but again only on YouTube number four URL searches there are going to be times where you know that something is relevant or important and it appears within the actual URL let's say you know the ID or UPC of a product that you're searching for we can search for just pages on Amazon that contain that ID by using the in url operator as an example let's search for pages that occur on Amazon and that include the ID of my book for people who believe they might be on the Spectrum our search query would look like this site colon amazon.com in url and in the ID of the book as you can plainly see we first require that anything we find must be located on the amazon.com website and that the URL to it must also include the ID tag of the book and sure enough when we execute this query we get a set of pages immediately back about the book and it's pretty restrictive it's a super specific way to compose a query when you know exactly what you're looking for but you have no idea where it will live on the site number three search by file Tye what if you wish to find data in a particular format like a PDF document or an Excel spreadsheet fortunately this is easy with the file type operator let's say you're searching for a secret budget from 1999 but that you're only interested if it comes in a PDF file you would compose your query like this file type colon PDF 1999 secret budget the first result we get back is a PDF file of the US Secret Service budget but that's not the type of secret that I meant so let's try making it more precise We'll add minus and then phrase Secret Service by excluding the erroneous Secret Service documents our top results now pertain to secret or black military budgets which is what we were looking for in the first place number two text and title searches with most searches you don't care where your search ter appears on the page but sometimes it does matter for example you might want to specify that you're searching only the title of the document which you can achieve with the intitle tag which of course can also be combined with other tags we've already learned so for example if if we want PDF documents with Saskatchewan in the title we would do it as follows in title colon Saskatchewan file type colon PDF sure enough every search result is now a downloadable PDF document with Saskatchewan in the title number one wild cards perhaps the most underutilized search operator is the Wild Card operator represented by the asterisk it matches anything and everything which doesn't sound that useful at first Until you realize that you can use it inside more complicated Expressions this query means we must have the quick brown anything and then either the word jumps or jumped and then over the anything dog thus it would match the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog but would also match the quick brown Sea Monkey Jumped over the scurvy dog one important caveat is that the Wild Card operator can take the place of any search term and can be used to match whole words or phrases even within quotation marks but it can't appear within a single word or term it does appear to work in some cases at the end of a term so if you were searching for cities that contain SAS but that do not include Saskatchewan on the page you could search as follows Sask star minus Saskatchewan city that will return pages that do contain words starting with Sask but that do not mention Saskatchewan and our first result comes back as a page relating to Saskatoon note that with this query you'd only get pages that mention Saskatoon but not Saskatchewan if you have any interest in matters related to autism Aspergers or ASD please check out my book on Amazon secrets of the autistic millionaire it's got nothing to do with money and everything everything to do with living a successful life on the Spectrum it's everything I know now that I wish I'd known back then I'm mostly in this for the subs and likes so please be sure to leave me one of each before you go today in the meantime and in between time I hope to see you next time right here in Dave's Garage when you want to make abs of Tuesday AB Tuesday