Andy Coates Blog

Have you ever found your self being frustrated whilst searching on Google for something which you know exists but you cant possibly seem to find again? Google does its bet to try and bring you the most relevant results for a basic keyword/phrase but sometimes thats not enough, to improve your searching try these simple little search tricks and 99.99% of the time you will be able to find what you are looking for. Not only will you find what you are looking for but you will save tons of time and increase you productivity! Follow these simple easy to remember techniques and they will be with you forever!

• "Quotation marks" - If you are looking for an exact phrase, surround you phrase in quotation marks, this tells Google that you want results which contain this exact phrase.
• AND - If you what your results to return all of the keywords used put an AND (in capitals) between each word. e,g search: andy AND coates AND money, this will return any documents containing all of these keywords
• OR - This is the same as above but gives the search engine a choice of this OR that. e.g search: andy AND coates OR money OR magic
• NOT - again, same as the previous examples but this operator excludes the particular word from a search to help narrow your results.

There are may other operators you can use but its probably quite rare that you will need these as you will probably find what you are looking for using the above search tools. Sometimes whilst searching the results will return a huge page full of text which would take hours to read through whilst trying to find what your looking for. Heres a very under-used technique to search through a huge amount of text to narrow down your search. This is already built into you browser whether you use Firefox or IE and is the Ctrl + F on you keyboard and in IE it will bring up a search box and in Firefox it will open a small search tool bar at the bottom of you browser (nice!).

Firefox:

Internet Explorer:

From here just type the text your looking for and it will search the document for hat keyword or phrase beginning at the top and working the way down the page, easy peazy and it will save you tons of time! For another productivity tip take a look at my post sleep your way to success or even better try searching for it using you new found search techniques.

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