“Okay Google… How do I Search for This?”
As a student, one of the things I’ve heard quite often is that we should NEVER Google the answer. It’s considered “cheating” — especially when you don’t cite your source — or an insult to the person teaching you. While I understand those perspectives, it was after I started working that I realized using a search engine well is a skill that’s incredibly valued in the workplace. Turns out you can’t remember everything, and no one is troubled by it when you know how to find the answers; so, for those of us wanting to further hone their search engine skills, here’s a little cheatsheet to help you up your search game!
Compound Words
A compound word is one that’s the result of combining two others to create a new meaning. Simple examples include “sunflower”, “mailman”, and “raindrop”. So what does this have to do with looking things up?
Well, what if I wanted to search up tea spoon to get an image of tea spoons (the fancy ones used as stirrers)? If I typed tea spoons into my search engine, it will likely populate the results with articles and images of both tea spoons and teaspoons; two very different things. To prevent this from happening, use quotation marks around the phrase you look up in order to only get results that contain the specified phrasing/spacing in them. Using our example, if I put “tea spoons” into my search engine, it will only give me articles and images to anything containing or pertaining to those fancy spoons and not the measuring unit.
I Kind of Know What I’m Looking For
All too often I find myself in a position where I know what website the information I need will be on, but the search tool on said website is simply not good enough to get me what I need. Sometimes it’s even a matter of knowing what I want from a certain website, but not having the time to navigate through said site to look for it. Well, do I have the shortcut for you!
In your search engine, simply type site: followed by the website you wish for the search to apply to. Then, leave a space after the website and insert the phrase you are looking for — don’t forget those quotes!
Student Must-Knows
As a student, finding what you need often goes beyond the basic website narrowing-down; we often need to look up resources to help guide us through concepts we need to review, and PDFs and PowerPoints are likely the sources that have the best summaries and most crediblity (as they will likely be published by teachers or professors). Even study guides can sometimes be posted online, and to find those quickly, it will require more than the previous two strategies.
To avoid spending precious time scrolling through search results looking for the little [PDF] indicator, type in what you are looking for, followed by a space and then filetype:PDF or filetype:PPT, depending on what you are looking for. And that’s it: PDFs and PPTs galore!!
What in the World Does This Mean?
One of the most common uses for a search engine is to simply look up a definition of a word. The way to get the best results for this is simple: type define: followed by the word you wish to get the definition of, and the search engine will get right to the point.
Two Birds With One Stone
Now, going back to the tea spoon example, what if I anticipated that by searching up tea spoon it could show two different things? Well, if I didn’t want to use quotation marks I could simply omit a cateogry that would likely include results I don’t want.
To omit certain results from popping up, simply type what you want to search, put a space, then use a - followed by what you’d like omitted from search results. In our example, to get the fancy tea spoons I would type in tea spoons -measure. Keep in mind that you can omit multiple words/categories (e.g. tea spoons -measure -recipes).
You can do the same thing for websites! Let’s say you’re looking up a certain topic for research and links to a non-credible source keep popping up. Just type -site followed by the website, and poof! Gone!
It’s Not Just One Word
Sometimes you‘re looking up an article that contains multiple key words, but your search results keep mentioning how they only contain one or two of the many things you need in said result. How do you ensure you get it all? It’s easy!
All I have to do is type allintext: followed by the keywords separated by spaces. For example, let’s say I want to look up an article about cats, dogs, and rain. I would type allintext:cats dogs rain.
It’s On the Tip of My Tongue!
We’ve all been there: “I know most of the lyrics but I just can’t remember the one word!!” or “I thought I remembered the whole quote but I simply can’t remember the one word!” Well, thank goodness there’s a solution to that.
Type in the phrase, using an * to fill in for what you don’t know. For example: do or do * there is no try should yield results containing the quote “Do or do not there is no try”.
What’s a Boolean?
For those of us who aren’t familiar with coding, the word boolean may not be familiar; boolean is something that can be either true or false (exclusive). When looking things up, sometimes we want search results containing more than one thing, like milk and eggs for example. To get search results with both, type in the words with the word AND in between them in all caps. Using our example, it would look like eggs AND milk.
But what if we want results containing eggs or milk? It’s the same idea, just use OR or | instead.
- eggs OR milk
- eggs|milk
It’s Just Like This Word…
We’ve all had that moment while writing a paper or in conversation where we just can’t think of the right word to describe something. We know a word similar but it simply does not do the topic justice. We could take the time filing through multiple thesauri looking for word we want, but who has the time to look through all those sites? Why not have the computer do most of the work? Type ~ followed by the word you want synonyms for (e.g. ~large will get you big, gigantic, huge, etc.).
So there you have it: a nice cheatsheet for whenever you’re looking something up and want the best possible results. And, just a cheatsheet to help you build valuable life skills that you can use in multiple aspects of your life. Happy Searching!
Much Love.
