Hardcore Google: Search Top Tips
Google has been my search weapon of choice for many years now. It’s fast, light on adverts and the search engine results pages (SERPs) in general are pretty good.
You can usually find what you’re looking for quite quickly or after refining your search words slightly.
But, I think very few people realise just how BIG and diverse Google is these days. How do you get the best from their search and just what are some of the other services they offer? What’s the future hold? More importantly, what’s the price of it all?
Well that’s a lot of questions, so I’ll try to tackle them in smaller chunks. Let’s get started then… with getting the best from Google Search.
I’d say most of the problems people have when using any search engine is a poor choice of keywords. To some extent, you have to think about the words someone else will have chosen when writing about a subject, rather than the words you would perhaps have used yourself.
Yesterday, I was searching for the retail price of a chest of drawers that I’d seen for sale second-hand. They looked good value, but since I’m no drawer expert I wanted to see if they really were a bargain.
I’d seen them for sale in a shop and took a picture with my phone (right).
When I got home, I fired up trusty Google. The drawers didn’t have any kind of logo or markings on when I inspected them, so it was always going to be a bit of a long shot. But, I had a picture as a reference, so off I went.
beech “chest of drawers” was the first thing I tried in Google. Hmmm. Lots of different types, so I followed a few of the links and looked to see how chest of drawers are generally described. The ones in my picture had 10 drawers in total, 5 side by side. It seems these are referred to as “5 plus 5″.
“5 plus 5″ drawers was the second query then. I skimmed through the first few results and couldn’t see what I wanted. Hmmm, let’s try Google Images I thought. That bought up only two pages of results, all with thumbnail pictures. Quite easy to quickly scan through. On the second page was a small image of the very ones I was looking for. Great! I followed that link and found that it was a ‘Chicago’ style. Still no price though, but I was close!
“5 plus 5″ chicago drawers was the third search. I followed the first link that came up. I couldn’t see exactly what I wanted, but there was a similarly styled wardrobe for sale from… Littlewoods. They were therefore the next logical step.
A quick search for ‘Chicago’ on the Littlewoods website brought up the exact price and an identical picture. Bingo! The ones I’d originally seen for sale were indeed a very good price, although I didn’t like the look of them once I’d seen another picture. Oh well.
Anyway, the moral of the story is that by using small tidbits of information that you find as a result of your searches, you can often refine and more accurately pinpoint information to find what you’re looking for. Even when you have only got a picture to go on.
There is a Google page full of ‘basic‘ and ‘advanced‘ search tips - ie using the quote operator (as used above), negating words from a search and using site searches etc, so I won’t reinvent the wheel by explaining them all. But they are well worth learning and they should be in everyone’s search armoury. If they aren’t in yours, now’s a great time to tool up! If you want to become a serious Googler, it might be a good opportunity to take a look at the synonym and numrange searches too.
Next time I’ll try and point out some of the funkier things you can do with Google search. Really, they are quite groovy.
September 8th, 2006 at 12:29 am
[...] Blogalism « Hardcore Google: Search Top Tips [...]
October 31st, 2006 at 10:37 pm
[...] In previous posts I tried to give some search tips, a quick guide to Google Maps, Google Earth and a few other bits and bobs. [...]