My Daily Cheat Sheets and Things To Do: December 2007

21 Google Search Tips
After playing around with Google's Advanced Search Made Easy, I came across two great pages on using Google's Search features better: via Dumb Little Man and Sell IUS, I culled this collection. These are my favorite Google search engine tips:
1. Use quotation marks to search for the exact phrase "co-op board rejection"
2. Movies. Use the "movie:" operator to search for a movie title along with either a zip code or U.S. city and state to get a list of movie theaters in the area and show times.
3. Music. The "music:" operator returns content related to music only.
4. Use the pipe () for an either/or search (or use the word "or"): fsboby owner.
5. Use two periods (..) to find information within a number range, including years: worst housing markets 1980..2006.
6. Not. If you don't want a term or phrase, use the "-" symbol. will return pages that contain "little" and "man" but that don't contain "dumb".
7. "Not X" Exclude search terms with a minus sign (-): worst housing markets 1980..2006 -best. (since the prior search usually includes best and worst, use the minus sign if you only want the bad news)
8. Find similar terms with the tilde (~): ~cheap homes. You get auctions, foreclosures, etc.
9. Use the wildcard symbol (*) if you don’t know the missing word: a man’s home is his *.
10. Location of term. By default, Google searches for your term throughout a web page. But if you just want it to search certain locations, you can use operators such as:
"inurl:"
"intitle:"
"intext:"
"inanchor:"
Those search for a term only within the URL, the title, the body text, and the anchor text (the text used to describe a link).

11. Get a list of definitions with "define:" define:foreclosure.
12. Site-specific. To search a particular site use "site:". Useful if a website or blog doesn’t have a search box: site:bigpicture.typepad.com.
13. Backlinks. The "link:" operator will find pages that link to a specific URL. You can use this not only for a main URL but even to a specific page. Not all links to an URL are listed, however. link:http://bigpicture.typepad.com
14. Type in the area code to find out the city: 212.
15. File types: If you just want to search for .PDF files, or Word documents, or Excel spreadsheets, for example, use the "filetype:" operator.
16. Vertical search: Instead of searching for a term across all pages on the web, search within a specialized field. Google has a number of specific searches, allowing you to search within blogs, news, books, and much more:
* Blog Search
* Book Search
* Scholar
* Catalogs
* Code Search
* Directory
* Finance
* Images
* Local/Maps
* News
* Patent Search
* Product Search
* Video
Numerical related searches:
17. Numrange: This little-known feature searches for a range of numbers. For example, ["best books 2002..2007] will return lists of best books for each of the years from 2002 to 2007 (note the two periods between the two numbers).
18. Use Google as a calculator: 472*92. Full calculator instructions are here
19. Unit converter: Use Google for a quick conversion, from yards to meters for example, or different currency: 12 meters in yards
20. Types of numbers: Google algorithms can recognize patterns in numbers you enter, so you can search for:
* Vehicle ID number (US only)
* Federal Communications Commission (FCC) equipment numbers (US only)
* UPC codes
* Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) airplane registration number (US only)
* Patent numbers (US only)
* Even stock quotes (using the stock symbol)
* weather forecast regarding the next five days
21. Advanced search. If you can't remember any of these operators, you can always use Google's advanced search.

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