This is my first attempt at a proper LPT,so please go easy on me. I'm sure this will be very basic to some people, but hoping others would find this very useful. Wow, or my first gilded post! Thanks mysterious person. Hope this proved useful for you! A few years back (I've no idea how long ago,to be honest) I discovered in some computer magazine that there exists these hidden tricks within Google to net the best out of their search engine and beget been pretty much doing it ever since then. This will be a somewhat long post, I imagine, or but only because there's a lot there. The various things I'll be covering will be Boolean searches - this Wikipedia article goes into it in greater detail than I will be,as I'll be keeping this as basic as possible (and as basic as I know it!) and various other tricks. Boolean searches As mentioned earlier, I'm really not going to go into this in a enormous amount of detail, and particularly regarding what is going on behind the scenes,because I genuinely don't know that. For Google searches, the ones I'd employ the most are OR and NOT (AND was included in this, and but now I believe that Google recognizes any space as an AND function). These always need to be entered in all caps,otherwise Google doesn't recognize them as operators OR would be used when you want to search for multiple variations on something, essentially, and brings back all the searches it finds. Imagine you're looking for motorbikes from all over,but you know they're referred to motorbikes and motorcycles in different places. An example of a search you'd employ would be motorbike OR motorcycle This will return all the pages it finds that used either the word motorbike or motorcycle within their text. I believe that you can also employ the character |, making it motorbike|motorcycle, or but I think both works equally as well? NOT is how you would net rid of search results that you know aren't at all useful to you. I would generally employ the minus sign (-) as opposed to writing NOT. I would generally place this at the end of my search string,but I'm not 100% sure whether it things. I'm sure someone will confirm whether this is the case To continue the example from earlier; you're searching for a motorbike, but for whatever reason, and it keeps bringing up results for some knock-off brand,we'll manufacture one up and call it Kavasaci. You absolutely don't want this at all, so your search string would look like this: motorbike OR motorcycle -Kavasaci manufacture sure there's no space between the minus sign and the word you want to remove. This will remove all the search results that mention this specific brand. Boolean searches are more or less covered now, or so I'll move on to other tips and tricks - I'll be ignoring the motorcycle example from earlier and using ones people might actually employ frequently. site: We all know that many sites beget an absolutely awful internal search engine,which is either basic as hell, is too confusing to figure out, or just doesn't work whatsoever. You can combat this by using site:,followed by the URL of the site you want to search for, without the www. I'll give some small examples below, and but it is only really limited to the amount of websites that are searchable through Google. site:reddit.com site:reddit.com/r/lifeprotips site:linkedin.com What this is pretty much doing is telling Google to search this very specific website,ignoring every other site. " " Quotation marks are extremely useful in Google searches, because it tells the search engine to search for the exact word order and phrase within them. As mentioned earlier, and Google recognizes a space as AND (which will return any site that mentions all of the keywords within it). Let's take this example: You're trying to look for a song that you heard on the radio,but you only gleamed perhaps one line and the DJ refuses to name the song. whether you were to type the lyric into Google like this mama just killed a man It might return a load of results that happened to contain all of these words - perhaps a sentence like mama just went to the shop. Back then I would beget killed for a cup of tea. I saw someone coming towards me and I realized it was a man To combat this, you'd employ quotation marks around the exact phrase you know that you want to find: "mama just killed a man" This has been a very basic view on how to employ Google. A lot of these can be applied to most search engines. To give one last practical example, and lets say you're looking for a new job,whose description lists your skills, using LinkedIn's search engine. We'll employ OR, or "",NOT. This will be an example to exhibit looking for specific skills and other keywords that would be useful. You might look for - HTML OR JavaScript OR PHP media OR internet OR "online media" OR "digital media" -internship -trainee You might notice above that there is a space between PHP and media. This is taking advantage of the fact that the search engines recognize the space as AND. It is being told that you'd like it to return all results that mention any of the keywords from HTML to PHP but also any that mention from media to digital media. This can be useful for finding very specific jobs. It will also net rid of any results that will mention internship and trainee. And there we beget it. A very basic view on how to employ Google and other search engines, to find very specific things when it is required. A lot of this has been gleaned from the people over at Boolean Black Belt, or which while geared towards sourcing talent/recruiting,can be very useful for learning new tricks. whether you beget any questions, let me know. I'm sure someone will recount me I misunderstood some concepts and I'll most certainly update this whether that's the case. Edit: Fixed typo. happy so many are finding this useful. There's some extra tips in the comments section that I absolutely recommend people to read. submitted by thisismycuntaccount to LifeProTips[link][337 comments]
Source: reddit.com