Five Google Search Features You Haven’t Been Using

Are any of these new to us, or are we all expert-level googlers now?  Someone did a list of google search features you might not know about.  Do you use any of these, and are they helpful?

1.  Hyphen searches.  If you put a hyphen in front of a word, it excludes results with that word.  The example Google gives is “jaguar speed -car”.  So, how fast the animal is, not the car.

2.  Tildes.  This thing: ~.  If you put one in front of a word, it also searches for synonyms of that word.  So something like “music ~classes”  will also look for music “lessons” and music “coaching.”

3.  Searching specific sites.  Start with the word “site”, then a colon, and the URL for the site you want to search.  For example, “site:olympics.com figure skating”

4.  Searching for different file types.  There’s a dedicated “image search” button, but you can also specifically search for things like PDFs and MP3s.  Just start your search with “filetype”, followed by a colon.  Example: “filetype:PDF”

5.  Asterisks.  If you don’t know a word, put an asterisk in there.  It’s useful if you don’t know the name of a song but know SOME of the lyrics.  For example, “falling down like * into *” is vague.  But Google knows you probably mean “like pieces into place” from the Taylor Swift song “All Too Well”.