How To Become A Google Power User

Searching the Internet for relevant information can be frustrating at times. More advanced researchers know tons of little tricks of the trade, getting them the desired results fast. But for the rest of the population, it isn't always easy to nail down information they are looking for.

If you find yourself amongst the second group, you might like the following tips and hints on how to find information fast. These can be considered Google tips for beginners. The next time you do a Google search, try it with some of these weapons.

• Define search
  If you are unsure of a word's meaning, you can use the search term define: to narrow down on the list of definitions. Just be aware that sometimes this search isn't as accurate as it should be.

• Number range search
  This is a cool search, especially if you are out to get an online bargain. Just say you shop for a blackberry phone but your budget is limited, use the following term (exchange your values and keyword to search your own) term = blackberry phone [$50]…[$400]

• Date search
  If you are in the market for the latest blackberry phone but don't want old results showing in your Google search, use the search term daterange. To do so, enter “Blackberry” daterange:startdate-enddate. However, Google is a funny beast. The dates need to be entered as a Julian date and frankly, it's totally confusing. To speed things up, use Gmacker.

• Quoted search
  Quoted searches are often used by niche marketers to find accurate results regarding their niche. Even though this is one of the most basic search terms, it seems many people don't use it at all. To do a quoted search, simply wrap your term into double quote marks; like this: “ipod nano 4GB”.

This will allow you to see the most relevant results without having to spend hours sieving through Google's links.

• Allinurl search
  This is a neat search to give you results with your target keyword contained in the actual domain link. To do this, insert allinurl:ipod nano 4GB into Google's search box and in return you will find URL's containing that keyword.

• Allintitle search
  This is the same principle like the allinurl search, but instead you will see results featuring your target word in the title of the result sites listed.

• Cache search
  You might know what a cached page looks like. If you don't, head over to Google right now and search for any term or word. Once the results are presented to you look closer at the right hand side of each result (next to the green text or below).

You will see a hyperlink called cache. Click on it and you will see what Google does to cache websites. It's like taking a snapshot, which allows us to go back in time and look at sites in the past.

To do a cache search, enter this term into the search box: cache:www.amazon.com(exchange for any website URL).

• Info search
  If you want to get more information on a particular website, you can do an info search by typing info:www.amazon.com for example.

This will return all sorts of information such as cached pages, similar websites, websites that link to.. and sites that contain the term.

• Site search
  The site search allows you to look for results from a specific domain only. If you do a site search for ipods on Amazon for example, you use the following search term: ipod site:www.amazon.com

• Advanced search
  To perform an advanced search, you can specify from any results page whether you want to narrow your search to images, video, news, map or web or more. It will fast track your search and by opening the advanced options field, you can even further drill down for a particular difficult search.

Google has also released a personalized search option that is supposed to analyze the searches you perform to provide you with more accurate results over time. To do this go to www.Google.com/psearch and sign up for web history.

Written on 12/01/2008 by Monika Mundell. Monika Mundell is a passionate freelance writer and pro-blogger. Her blog Freelance Writing helps new freelance writers to get started in this exciting industry. If you like to work with Monika, feel free to visit her Portfolio site.

Photo Credit: Google