How to get genuinely useful Google search results

This can be useful when searching for results on Wikipedia, for example. Performing a regular search might well bring up many sponsored, optimized, and biased sites before the online encyclopedia, but if you add “site: wikipedia.org” you will only get results from Wikipedia – and you can still take advantage of Google’s excellent search and page ranking capabilities.

The same trick works for just about any site that you consider to be an authority. You might want to focus on a certain news site that you trust, for example, or maybe you want to see results from an official website related to your search rather than matches from elsewhere. on the Web.

Use advanced search tools

In your haste to search the web, you might not have noticed the little cog icon at the top right of the Google search results page. Click on it then choose Advanced search, and you have access to a multitude of additional parameters that will make your searches more precise and efficient.

You can use the Advanced Search page to include or exclude certain words, as we have already mentioned. You can also restrict your results to a particular language or region, again useful when you get a lot of redundant results. Another useful option here is the File type drop-down list, which allows you to search PDF files, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, GIFs in image search and other file types rather than web pages.

The Advanced Search page also provides options to view pages that have been updated recently, to search for keywords in a particular part of a website, and to link content that has a Creative Commons license associated with it. Once you start using these advanced features, you might wonder how you ever got along without them.

Add more search operators

You can deploy a number of search operators to dig deep into Google results and return page matches that you wouldn’t get otherwise. Put “OR” between your keywords to search for several different terms at the same time that do not necessarily all have to match. You can also use the asterisk (“*”) as a wildcard that Google will use to return all of the most popular results for – “how to learn * on YouTube” for example.