Advanced Searches You Should Know How to Use
Here are a few advanced searches that are incredibly valuable:
1. "quoting phrases" will search for the words within the quote in only that order. This is especially valuable when searching for people.
2. Searching within a site: site:technologyevangelist.com twitter brings back pages from this site that include the term "twitter"
3. -negatives Throw a minus sign in front of a word to filter out results including that term. Say, you're interested in the Olympics, but not gymnastics, diving, or equestrian. No problem: olympics -gymnastics -diving -equestrian
4. Top level domains: Want to find out what government agencies are saying about global warming? Try this: site:gov "global warming"
5. Google Alerts: Take searches that interest you and track them using Google Alerts. Whenever Google discovers something new on the web matching your search criteria they'll email it to you.
What would you add?
The number range operator at Google can be useful too. Search between two numbers with two periods. ('"top 100.1000" movies' would return large movie lists.)
You can also use Yahoo Pipes to set up persistent searches that go beyond Google Alerts, including forums, myspace and other sources.
You should also check out FaveBot.com — it can track keywords / phrases in podcasts, videos, blog posts, news articles, (new) books, etc. Plus it can find local events matching your keywords. You can track your output (results) on the site or via RSS feeds.
I wish that Google had a default setting that you could easily over-ride and reset to your own liking, that default setting would appear on the opening page with a check box to turn it off. I am sick of getting old pages, so the idea is: uncheck this box if you want to see pages older than the last two years.
Jon, Google does seem to be providing much fresher pages when they consider the searches to be timely. For example, a search for "Presidential Debate" when conducted today will definitely bring up content relevant to yesterday's debate rather than previous ones.
1. Posted by: Peter Edstrom on August 16, 2008 9:02 PM:
I use google alerts in various ways. Most of the time I just use it to track what is publicly being said about my employer, but I've used it to keep up on news events (in an almost live sort of way), and I use it to track random interests such as posts that might be relevant to my own blog. Etc.