Don’t search high and low to find what you want. Try these expert tip from Randolph Hock, author of The Extreme Searcher’s Internet Handbook, and learn seven surprising ways to utilize the Google search field.
To Find PDFs, Excel spreadsheets or PowerPoint Presentations:
Use: filetype:pdf, filetype:xls, or filetype:ppt
Example: Canon manual filetype:pdf
Why: If you include the file type in your search, Google will turn up only relevant files.
For example, entering filetype:pdf will find all the PDFs that have to do with operating
your new camera. (For Excel files, use filetype:xls; for PowerPoint presentations,
filetype:ppt.)
To Find: Narrowed-Down Information
Use: a hyphen (minus sign)
Example: jaguar -cars -football
Why: You want information about jaguars―the animal, not the car or the sports team.
Placing a hyphen before terms you want to exclude will omit pages with those words.
Type a space before the hyphen, but not after.
To Find: A Product You Saw Online (But Can’t Remember Where)
Use: intitle:
Example: intitle:“Frye boots”
Why: Using the term intitle: searches the words in the title bar of Web pages and can be
particularly helpful if you remember the name of an item you liked but not where you
found it. Just be sure not to put a space after the colon and to use quotation marks around
the phrase.
To Find: A Verbatim Phrase
Use: quotation marks
Example: “Bikram yoga”
Why: Using quotation marks around a phrase or a person’s name can eliminate many of
the irrelevant links you would otherwise turn up, says Hock.
