20 Tips For Better Google Searches : Put It in Quotes

By David Bénard , published on May 7, 2008 at 9:40 AM
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google tips

Put It in Quotes

The first thing to remember when you seek exact matches of search terms is to put the words in quotes; this will cause Google to look for those exact phrases. For example, if you type "Google Files" in quotation marks as a search item, then you will without fail find the relevant results. If you input these search terms without quotation marks, though, then your results will be very different: the search will display links to pages with the word "Google," but not necessarily also with "files." Using quotation marks is also very handy when seeking information for a specific person or address, such as "first last name" or "address zip code city", proper names, such as "Franklin Roosevelt", or song lyrics like "Love, Love Me Do."
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Comments
Anonymous 05/08/2008 1:22 AM
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Google calculator, which can convert units, is also very handy. For example, type in "100 m to ft" and Google returns "100 meters = 328.08399 feet". It can also handle calculations involving units: for example typing in "(9.81 m/s^2)*(10kg)" will yield "(9.81 (m / (s^2))) * (10 kg) = 98.1 newtons."

Anonymous 05/09/2008 3:53 PM
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From the Article:
For example, "NFL football ?doping" will generate results related to "NFL football" while excluding those that mention "doping" and subjects related to the word.


The correct syntax should be "NFL football" -doping

psouza4 05/12/2008 8:27 PM
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It is exactly this kind of zealous biasy that drives me to question my faith in Tom's Hardware reviews and statistics: something I've trusted for many years. I've been putting up with this growing problem for a rather long time, but now it's reaching new lows.

First of all, I feel Google is a wonderful resource, and though I have some anti-trust issues with them, I happily feed my Google habit daily. That said, I don't feel a guide on Google tips needs to depict an employee at the end with so much out of place... from political agenda to product placement, there could be very few ways to make it more offensive to the idea that Tom's Hardware should be trusted as a non-biased source of information.

Nevermind that this article is riddled with typographical errors -- I liked the common interest it was headed until this final page. Some of you may roll your eyes at this post, too (trust me when I say it's out of my normal practice to be vocal about my complaints of a website), but this has been a problem that's grown progressively worse.

Tom's Hardware needs to wake up and get back on the right path...

fransizzle 05/21/2008 9:47 AM
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Honestly, speaking as a long time reader, the overall quality of the site (especially the spell checking) does seem to have dropped significantly since the last big overhaul. I too hope that they will get back to publishing more solid reviews and less of this poorly edited fluff.

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