07 July 2008

Using Google search more efficiently : Tip #1

Very few people know about the power of Google Search. If you typed Mickey Mouse into Google, you would get hits for Mickey Mouse, and any other page where the word Mickey and the word Mouse appeared - thus including anyone else called Mickey and anyone or anything else called Mouse. Put inverted commas into the equation "Mickey Mouse" and your hits returned are just those places where the eponymous Disney character appears.

Next level of complexity allows you to search for one thing OR another, and those capitals are important. So a search on "Mickey Mouse" OR "Donald Duck" would find any page where either character was mentioned, but does not require both to appear. Leaving out the OR would be the same as putting AND in there, so it searches for pages where one AND the other name appear ie both.