Samiul Bashar Samin
It’s difficult to imagine our lives without the help of search engines, the biggest of the lot being Google. The search engine has become so integral in our daily lives that it’s also made its way into the dictionary as a verb and a noun. But, effective googling is still a skill that not many of us possess. So here are a few tips to help you google more efficiently and make sure that research paper is done before the deadline.
Keywords
This is the most basic tip you’ll be getting from here. Randomly searching for something without a keyword will lead you to a throng of useless sites and you’ll probably be wasting the rest of your day going through useless links.
Stop Words
Google usually eliminates words such as what, how, when and even single letters such asaas they only slow down your search. However, if it’s really essential to us a stop word, you can do it by just typing out the +sign before the stop word, for example “ +how do unicorns poop?” and so on. Make sure you include a space before the + sign.
Exclude Irrelevant Words
This shouldn’t come as a surprise. When you include irrelevant words, it broadens the net of search results you get because of other useless sites having a word that is common to your said irrelevant word. Since some words have a few different meanings, you can use the google operator here. For example, if you want to search for a bass guitar, you can exclude the words which refer to bass the fish by just typing out the sign – before the word. So if you want to look for a bass guitar and not the fish, just type “ –fish” and your search will exclude words that refer to this particular fish.
Similar Words
Sometimes you’ll see some words just won’t bring out the most refined results. At this point, synonyms should be your new best friend. You can search for similar words using the ~ symbol. If you need to put in a search and want to include the synonym of a word such as music, just type “ ~music” and you’ll be searching with references to music, songs and every other related word. So now that you have all these useful tricks in your arsenal, time to unleash all those new google skills you just learnt and finish that paper already, or you could just do that after you finish Googling for all the cat videos in this world.