Google Search Tips - Top 10 Advanced Things to Know

Already mastered the basics? Then you're ready to move on to:

Top Ten advanced things to know about Google Search:

1. While Google ignores common words such as where, entering where new york will also yield maps and hotel guides.
   
2. Quickly look up definitions -- define: rss will yield several explanations for Rich Site Summary (Or, get even more dictionary definitions via Dictionary.com)
3. You can find synonyms of words -- entering ~house will also yield pages with home on them.
   
4. Google will recognize some natural language expressions -- weather philadelphia, pa produces and up-to-date local weather report.
   
5. Using the lesser known “numrange” operator -- 2000..2005 (that’s two dots in between two numbers) will find pages with 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2005 in them.
   
6. Use Google for Q&A -- enter Population of USA and the answer 298,444,215 will be displayed in addition to page results.
   
7. Use an upper case OR for special searches - eagles win OR lose will find Philadelphia Eagles-related pages about wins, or those pages about losses . Lower-case won’t work in this situation, and would
   simply search for occurrences of the word “or”.
   
8. Find backlinks by using Google Blog Search or by using the link-operator, for example, link:blog.searchenginewatch.com
   
9. You can restrict your search to certain types of domains and servers -- apply site:.edu will yield apply pages on college and university "edu" domains. Also try Google Scholar, or use Google UncleSam, to limit your search to material from government sites.
   
10. Finding out who links to a Web page -- link:www.cnn.coom will yield a list of sites that link to the home page of CNN.
    
    ... and Web developers especially will want to know:
    
    
11. Some documents are not completely indexed by Google. Indexing of the text in Web pages stops after the first 101Kb (For PDF, it's 120Kb.)
    
12. Not every Google version offers all of Google's features. For example, using Google on the Washington Post site does not offer the cache or similar page options.
    
13. Limiting by date can be a problem. Date searching is reliable only when Google can consistently identify them as it does with Usenet message (Google Groups) and news (Google News).