How To Use Google Advanced Search
Monday, June 13th, 2011How To Use Google Advanced Search
Nearly 17 billion explicit core U.S. searches were conducted in January of 2011 alone. Google Sites ranked first with 11.1 billion searches. Source – comScore. It is the worldwide defacto information gathering and retrieval source. We depend on it for our day to day Pittsburgh Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization work.
Google has provided us with an even better way to retrieve information - Advanced Search. We believe that increasing your efficiency with these techniques for acquiring more targeted and therefore better information will serve you well. Whether your looking for a favorite song from days gone by or an electrician, Advanced Search can help.
To help you explore Google’s Advanced Search we have provided links to the specific sections along the way for you to follow along and try your own Advanced Searches, so let’s get on with it.
The Google Advanced Search Link
As the image shows, navigating to the Google Homepage and looking just to the right of the Search box appears a diminutive link with a whole world of possibilities behind it. So click it. Click this Google Advanced Search Link if you don't see it on the Google homepage.
The Google Advanced Search Query Page
Google Advanced Search Options page
You should now see the above image. The Google Advanced Search interface customizes your queries to the Google Index for you. This is very powerful for refining your search to provide the most topical and relevant information. It does this by using human questions not Boolean operators, so it in effect teaches you advanced operators as you go. This is very cool and extremely powerful.
Google Advanced Search in Action – Constructing Your Query
In this section we’ll walk you through some of the advanced options and give you some insight into how to harness the power of the Advanced Search operators. For the purpose of this post we’re going to target a topic we know well – Google Advanced Search.
Entering the search phrase Google Advanced Search into the this exact wording or phrase box adds quotation marks around the query. It’s no surprise that this effectively matches Google’s best results for the exact phrase you entered.
TIP about the Tip Links - In addition you can click any of the tip links to the right of the query boxes in Advanced Search to learn how to do advanced searches in standard search.
Google Advanced Search Screen Results
Advanced search also builds your query in the box above at the top of the Advanced Search screen. This will come in handy when we enter our custom queries into our How to use Google Alerts Post which is coming very soon.
Some other queries on the Advanced Search page are:
- Using the OR operator by selecting to enter your query into the one or more of these words query box.
- Searching without specific words using the Don’t show pages that have any of these unwanted words query box.
- Searching within a certain file type using the File Type query box can be very helpful for digging through resource material.
Additional posts on Advanced Search Operations and Operators can be found amazingly by doing an Advanced Search and selecting the Advanced reading level option.
Google Advanced Search Operations and Operators
Additional Advanced Search Options
An additional section also appears in a link at the bottom of the Advanced Search page; the date, usage rights, numeric range, and more link. See the results below when the plus sign is clicked.
Additional Date Usage Rights Numeric Range and More
We use the date option frequently to get the most current results about a given topic and excluding old and outdated information. Other helpful information resides here so it is important to mention.
Using Google Advanced Search can give you Creative and Competitive Intelligence that would have taken hours to sift through. Learning to use these free tools from Google can enhance your effectiveness at your job or speed up your personal search experience. We hope you enjoyed this post. Please leave us a comment about your own experiences with Google Advanced Search.
