SEARCH - A TUTORIAL // salt create

Google search is one of the most powerful tools we have at our disposal

We just don’t use it as well as we should

Boolean - the absolute basics

dog bone hat

will search for all of those terms

in any combination

“dog with a bone hat”

will search for any occurances of that exact phrase

dog or bone or hat

will search for either of those three words

dog (bone or hat)

if you definitely want dog, but aren’t bothered whether the dog has a bone, or a hat

being negative’s not always a bad thing

dog hat -bone

you want dog and hat, but you want to exclude any mentions of bones

dog hat -bones -bonemarrow -cats -whatever

and if that doesn’t narrow down the search enough, just take more terms away

some more advanced tools

intitle:”dog in a hat”

limit your search to words in a title or a webpage, news story or blogpost

inurl:dog bones

wil search for occurances of those words in the page titles of websites

very handy for finding brand own websites

intext: dog hat bone

so this searches only body text (i.e., ignores link text, URLs, and titles)

site:www.pfma.com dog

you can search for particular terms within a specific website

site:loc.gov dogs

or within a particular domain - such as those denoting education, local government etc

bill gates -site:microsoft.com -site:wikipedia.org

this also allows you to exclude the big obvious sites from searches

link:www.saltlondon.com

searches for all webpages that link to a particular url - could be a press release etc

very useful

“dog hats” filetype:ppt

a search can also look for a particular file type... which might be useful for presentations and reports (pdfs)

related:www.cnn.com

looks for websites related to the one in question, so for cnn it will pull up news sites,

for google it’ll list search engines

and finally...

and you can use the same terms in the image and blog searches

dog wierdos -hat - bone

you don’t have to use all of them straight away...

the idea is to give them a try and see how they improve your searches

and save me time | effort | hair.... thankyou