Goggle search has become one of the most popular search engines there are. As an IT person, I cannot know everything. No one knows everything about the job they do. When I come across something that I don’t know how to do I search using Google. There are some tricks that can help you find what you are looking for.

The first thing about google searching is, you need to find more than one website before you take that answer as the correct answer. The web is created by people and some people lie or think they know what they are talking about and don’t. Also use credible websites. This depends on what you are searching for, but you will learn what sites to trust and what not to.

You can use keywords to narrow your results or to find what you are looking for. There are many and can be combined.

site:[website URL] and what you are searching for will search for what you are looking for on the specified site. For example, site: www.cnn.com car wreck will show results of car wrecks on www.cnn.com.

author:[name] will show results for the specified author.

intitle:[word] will give results with that word in the title.

inurl:[url] before a search will only give results that have your search in the websites URL.

filetype:[file extension] and search term will search for files of that type with your search terms, .jpg will show images, .doc will show word documents, etc.

related: and a website will result in sites like it.

Using the minus sign (-) after your search terms will exclude what is after the minus sign. For example if you are searching for jaguar the animal, jaguar -car will exclude the jaguar car.

Using an asterisk (*) as a “wildcard” search. The worlds largest * for example may show results for large things such as worlds largest ball of yarn.

You can create a range for your terms by using two periods (..). Popular computer 2000..2001 will show the popular computers between those years.

Using quotation marks (“) around your search words will get results with exactly those words, all of them in that order.

Any of these can be added together to broaden or restrict your search, depending on what you want. site:apple.com MacBook -air would result in items from the apple website about MacBooks, but not the MacBook Air.

Using these tricks can help find the results you need. Another way is to use the Advanced Search option which will give you many options to find what you need. Just go to www.google.com/advanced_search.