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Google Speed Search Lesson #9 - Features

March 28th, 2008 by Nick Ramsay

This is part nine of my Google Speed-Search series. In the last lesson, I gave examples of using Google’s site: syntax. In this lesson, we’re going to have some fun with some really useful search features.
Google as a calculator
Did you know you can use Google as a calculator? Using either math or plain English, just [...]

Posted in Technology | 4 Comments »

Google Speed Search Lesson #8 - Site:

March 17th, 2008 by Nick Ramsay

This is part eight of my Google Speed-Search series. In the last lesson, I showed you some of Google’s special syntax. This time, I’ll continue that theme with the site: syntax element.
Searching a web site

If you know which site you want to search, Google’s site command is a wonderful time saver that often cuts two [...]

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Google Speed Search Lesson #7 - Special Syntax

February 6th, 2008 by Nick Ramsay

Here’s part seven of my Google Speed-Search series. This post looks at how you can use special syntax to finds results based on title, body text or url.
Searching only page titles
Let’s say you wanted to find profile pages for Michael Jackson. The most relevant will have “Michael Jackson profile” in the title, right? So, [...]

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Google Speed-Search Lesson #6 - Wildcards

December 12th, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

Here’s part six of my Google Speed-Search series. In this lesson, we’ll use wildcards to speed up our searches.
A wildcard in Google is represented by an asterisk (*) and used instead of a single word. Consider this search:
“Mount Fuji is * high”
This phrase search forces Google to return web pages with the exact phrase above, [...]

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Google Speed-Search Lesson #5 - Case Sensitivity

December 8th, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

Here’s part five of my Google Speed-Search series. This post answers the question, is a Google search case sensitive?
What difference does case make?
Some search engines will return different results depending on whether you use upper or lower case characters. So, for example, if you type apple you’d get results for the fruit or technology giant. If you [...]

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Google Speed-Search Lesson #3 - Negation

November 29th, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

This is the third part in my Google Speed-Search series. Here are the first two parts if you missed them:

Google Speed-Search Lesson #1 - Phrase Searches
Google Speed-Search Lesson #2 - Boolean

Remove unwanted results with negation
This lesson introduces negation, i.e. using a minus sign (-) to specify terms you don’t want to appear in your search results. This [...]

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Google Speed-Search Lesson #2 - Boolean

November 26th, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

In Google Speed-Search Lesson #1, I showed you how to do phrase searches. In this lesson, we’ll look at basic Boolean, i.e. using uppercase AND and OR in our searches.
Let’s imagine you’re British and you want to find websites about Father Christmas, you might start with this:
Father Christmas
What you’re really telling Google is to search [...]

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Google Speed-Search Lesson #1 - Phrase Searches

November 23rd, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

When I was in Secondary school, my math teacher gave us a peculiar exercise for homework. She wanted us to memorize the alphabet backwards before the next lesson. Not surprisingly, when that lesson came, there were only two of us in the class who had actually made the effort to remember our ABCs in reverse order. Thanks [...]