We use Google Search multiple times every day. Sometimes, we do multiple searches to find answer to one question in our mind.
But there is a better way to make your searches more effective. Here are a few tricks you could use to turbocharge your next search:
1. site:
Let’s say you want to search for a NY Times article about US Covid fatalities. A regular user would do a search something like: “NY Times US Covid fatalities”. But that would return any webpage with any of the words in the search query.
Our aim however, was to search inside the NYTimes site. A better search query is “site:nytimes.com US Covid fatalities“.
What “site:nytimes.com” does is that it restricts the search to just inside nytimes.com. Have a look at the difference in total search results:
You can also search on a particular domain. For eg. search for Covid travel restrictions in .gov sites can be done through “site:.gov Covid travel restrictions”
2. -, the exclude operator
Let’s say you want to search about the return policy of Apple, the company. But since the Apple is also a fruit you will get results on apple the fruit and many many recipe web pages with apple in the search results.
Instead you could filter out fruit related webpages by searching for “Apple return policy -fruit -recipe”. This is more powerful in more obscure and uncommon searches while the search keyword has a popular twin.
3. “”, Exact match search
When you do a search for french banana pie, the search interprets it as three different words and returns web pages that has either french or banana or pie in it. This would return a ton of irrelevant search results.
A better way would be to search the same with double-quotes at the start and end i.e. “french banana cream pie”. This restricts the search results to only those webpages that have an exact match to term inside quotes.
It is incredibly powerful!
4. related:, find similar websites
Let’s say you found a website that has great information on a topic. And now you want to see if there are similar websites like the one you found. The keyword “related:<site name>” can help you get that info.
Here’s an example for a SEO tools site – Ahrefs. Say you want to know of websites similar to Ahrefs.
Bonus hack!
Now, you may not remember these hacks. So, we are here to give you an easier way.
Book mark this post and use the below links to go to Google’s Advanced Search. You can use the same powerful hacks mentioned above but without remembering the operators.
Interestingly, these pages are hidden from the Google homepage. You can only reach here if you know the URLs. (you can thank us later! :))
There are many more ways in which you can turbocharge your searches on Google. We will cover more of them in future posts.
– Practics.in team
At Practics.in, we pride ourselves on being great at what we do, i.e. SEO and Content Mktg. We understand search engines and content well enough to help businesses get the most out of their online presence. We can help you rank high on relevant searches by your potential customers.
Try us. If you are not satisfied with our services, we give a 100% refund for our first month of work together. No questions asked.
Check out our incredible success stories.
WhatsApp us at +91 99670 85327 or email at contact@practics.in to know how you can transform your marketing.
