Search Smarter

When you hear someone banging on about 'boolean operators' you might well just want to give this an eye roll emoji and move on, but wait, trust me, these are really useful, so good I use them almost every day.

Just remember when using an operator, this is not an essay, so NO SPACE after the colon or it won't work!

Six Scintillating Search Strings

"search term in quotes"

So you get exactly what you're looking for, not almost what you're looking for.

intitle:

intitle:gaming will only give you websites where this is the title of the page not just a possibly fleeting reference within an article that is primarily about something else completely different.

site:

site:uk or site:sg or site:ie

Now you get websites that are based in that nation, eg United Kingdom, especially useful for research where you want the perspective of people of a certain nation not just the most popular websites on the Internet.

define:

Get a dictionary definition not just a webpage with the word in,

eg define:obstreperous

-

-bear

exclude a particular term that keeps messing up your search results, eg maybe you’re searching for Koala, but you keep on getting websites that include the phrase “koala bear“

Use the Tools

All sorts of goodies in here, eg find images of a certain size, or that have a certain colour or even that are transparent

(great for Google Slides)

Did you know you can search for an image, with another image?

  1. Do an image search

  2. Find one you like

  3. Drag and drop the thumbnail

  4. Drop it on the window that appears

  5. Click on 'Visually similar images'

  6. :o)