More Efficient Google Searches

Normally I try to avoid much linking to other sites. But here is a good article with tips on search. And that is a skill that opens up much of the infromation on the internet. For our complete beginner to newbie audience: Go read this.

From a site Zen Habits.net (a Getting things done, personal producitivity site) comes 20 Tips for More Efficient Google Searches

Some good highlights:

2 Quotes. If you want to search for an exact phrase, use quotes. ["dumb little man"] will only find that exact phrase. [dumb "little man"] will find pages that contain the word dumb and the exact phrase "little man".

4 Similar terms. Use the "~" symbol to return similar terms. [~dumb little man -dumb] will get you pages that contain "funny little man" and "stupid little man" but not "dumb little man".

Update: This can be confusing taken out of context since they've mixed item 3 with 4.

[~dumb little man] will tell google to go look up things that it thinks similar to dumb (stupid, slow, etc.) and to use those in the results as well. That mean's stupid little man would also be returned.

13 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.

You can enter postal codes (no spaces) in place of zip codes. Canadian cities seem to work (e.g. movies:toronto) from google.ca

15 Unit converter. Use Google for a quick conversion, from yards to meters for example, or different currency: [12 meters in yards]

This conversion seems endless.

• For those computer types you can convert between hexidecimal, octal, binary and decimal.


• It will even convert currencies. "88 usd to cad"