Posted by Rob
Posted on 07-25-2008 under Client Education, Creative Business, SEO

Google has a lot of powerful search features you probably aren’t using!

We talk about Google a lot around here…but how many of you actually know how to use it?  Of course, anyone can run a simple search for, say, komodo dragon underwear.  But you can save yourself a lot of time if you use Google’s simple search commands to narrow in on your search before you hit that search button.

For example, your search for komodo dragon underwear could get you your desired result - underwear with little komodo dragons printed on it (where did you think I was going with that?).  However, the way Google works, it could also get you a page about underwear models posing next to komodo dragons.  Or a company on the island of Komodo that manufactures underwear for dragons.  Basically, a simple search will look for pages with all of the words you search for, ideally in the order you put them in, but sometimes just living together on the same page.  So, if someone had a page with three paragraphs, one about the island of Komodo in Indonesia, one about mythical Chinese dragons, and one about underwear models, that could possibly come up as a result of your search.

This ability of Google to make smart choices about page content is one of the reasons they are successful - they can analyze the context of words in a page and return searchs (and ads) based on them.  It is also one of the foundations of good quality SEO (which we do here at Frye / Wiles - shameless plug).  However, sometimes you want your search to really be more specific.

So if all you want is to return pages that specifically have the phrase komodo dragon underwear, in that order, you have to put your search phrase in quotes, like this:

"komodo dragon underwear"

Ok, so that is pretty simple - most people who have done any decent amount of text searching know about the quotation marks trick.  But wait!  There’s more!  What if you want a page about komodo dragons, but you’re sick and tired of all those dang komodo dragon underwear sites popping up?  well, that’s easy too:

komodo dragon -underwear

See what I did there?  Putting a minus in front of the undesired word will turn it into a negative search term, so pages with the word underwear won’t show up in your search results.

But that’s not all!  Google will actually allow you to do much, much more with your searches.  Say you want a picture of a lot of komodo dragons.  Like a hundred of them.  All hanging out together.  Or maybe even 150?  Well, in that case you could tell Google to give you:

picture of 100...150 komodo dragons

See that?  Putting a [...] inbetween a range of numbers will look for anything within that range.  To be honest, though, that search would probably be more useful looking for komodo dragons in a certain price range (search for:  komodo dragon $100…150).  150 komodo dragons all hanging out together would probably be mass carnage.  They are cannibalistic, after all.

Intrigued? For all the latest Google search modifiers, check out the Google Cheat Sheet.  Enjoy!