How 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.

Business is warfare. This is a capitalist society, let’s not forget that. If you are to be successful in business you have to go to war with your competition. Look at the terminology- Tactics, strategies, campaigns; its warfare. The oldest and most studied successful theory on warfare was written by Sun Tzu about 2600 years ago and it still holds true today. How does Google play into all this? Google is implementing the Art of War masterfully. Lets look at some of the basic premises of the art of war and we’ll give you our take in more detail.

The Art of War states if you know these 5 things you can predict the outcome of any battle.

1. The Moral Law – Make sure your soldiers obey wholeheartedly. Google, while giving the impression that it is open, is a closed society. Trade secrets and the special sauce called the algorithm dictate this.

2. Heaven – This signifies the business climate. As the leader in the industry, Google can mostly dictate this as well.

3. Earth – this is where Google really thrives, as they should. They own Google Earth. LOL This tenet speaks about the battlefield specifically. Security, danger, and all that goes with the business terrain.

4. The Commander – Strictness and benevolence. Keeping ideas and information secretive and close to the vest has always been another strong suit.

5. Method and Discipline – Until recently I would have given them an A+ in this matter. They seem to be stretched fairly thin at this point. Are their armies disciplined enough to keep up the fight? I think so.

Let’s look at the current state of affairs that Google faces:

- The Microsoft Yahoo deal is coming along but is an unknown quantity. Google has its spies I’m sure. Are they worried? Probably not worried; but watching, definitely.

- Facebook is the juggernaut that Google was 5 years ago. Facebook forces them to fight a reactive fight on the Social Media Front. This steals resources and keeps them in catch up mode.

- Social Media has been an elusive prize for the search giant. Buzz flopped. Their Wave has closed out, (pun intended.) Orkut is all but unknown in the US. Nice try.

- YouTube continues to be a shining star in the Google's crown and Docs have taken much of the Microsoft war chest away – thus decreasing Microsofts ability to fight.

- Adwords continues to be the Jewel. This allows Google to partake in all their nominal and pet projects as well as finance the dynasty.

- Local Search would seem to be the next evolution of the Search algorithm but Google appears lost here. Testing and monetizing the Maps with tags is weak and feeble. A chink in the armor? Their maps algorithm has been spammed since its inception and their results are a joke. It could get worse before it gets better. Foursquare and GoWalla have teamed up with Facebook who we hear has plans for it’s own search engine as well as the recent release of their own Places product for local search.

- Mobile Oh, did we forget to mention Apple? The IPod, IPad, IPhone and all the Appleites are out there still. Apple has had a few missteps recently but their followers are devout. See our Apple post about this. Google has its hands full and it is fighting this war on many fronts. Does it have the ability to fend off all the legal actions, its competitors, the regulators, the public? Time will tell.

A look at the Google acquisitions since its inception below. This is a fantastic infographic found at http://www.scores.org. It gives an overview of Google’s battlefield strategy.

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Google Real Time Search Results – A Game Changer

Now more than ever the field of Pittsburgh Online Marketing has become hypercompetitive. With Google putting out a new product every month, life in the Internet Marketing field gets more dynamic daily; and more fun. The scope of the upcoming 2010 changes is vast. There are many new products and changes. One change is the way Google plans to implement real time search results in its search engine algorithm.

In addition to PPC (sponsored results on the top and sides of the search results pages) and Google Maps for some keyphrase searches, Google has added real time search results. This position, appearing on page 1 for trending topics, leaves even less room for the organic results that Google users are used to seeing.

Never has social media been more important to ranking high for search terms in Google. Position is everything on a search results page and when it comes to edging out your competition for business, the highest rank usually prevails. Our advice is to implement a social media marketing strategy now if you haven’t already. If you have a social media campaign in place, now is the time to revisit it and re-evaluate your business needs and your comprehensive brand message.

When in doubt hire professionals to do a complete analysis of your needs and targets. You could be leaving valuable dollars at your competitor’s doorstep. If you have little or no idea what this means but realize its importance and would like to establish a social media campaign to benefit your company, visit our contact page for a free Blackball Online Marketing – Pittsburgh Social Media Marketing Experts consultation.