Google Hacks anyone can do- by Bob Cefail

Here's another Bob Cefail Internet Search tip:

A lot of people aren't familiar with Google's advanced search features, which are very powerful, so lets rectify this a bit, shall we?

One of the easiest, coolest things to do is to tweak the search results you want by the simple
use of the - (hyphen) symbol.

Lets say you want to search for information about mice. Ok great, you type in mice into Google, which looks like this:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=mice&btnG=Search

Ok, now some of the sites coming up aren't really all that great, because Google doesn't know if you mean the rodent, or the electronic kind we all know and love.

To get all the rodent results out, you just search for mice -rodent

This takes all the rodent related results out. One of my favorites if I am researching something is to use -com which takes out all the dot com results and usually gives me much better information, scholarly articles, etc.

People that are familiar with Google Adwords will recognize this technique immediately as "negative keywords" and yes it really is the same thing pretty much, except this was built into Google regular search long before it was used in the adwords advertising program.

So the above search with the "negative keywords" would look like this:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=mice+-rodent&btnG=Search

As you can see, the search results are much changed. You can change them even further by eliminating words like -gaming if you are more interested in a regular mouse, and do lots of tweaks from there.

Until Next Time,

Bob Cefail