Slacker Manager

13 Ways to Improve Your Google Search

by David Zinger on September 8th, 2007

How do you search? Most of us use Google yet how many of us will advance our search with one extra click to get the results we are really looking for.

Perhaps you are looking only for PowerPoint presentations or you want to find some free music that you can use without any restraints on copyright or royalties.

There are so many ways to search for information yet most of us default on searching by typing our word or phrase into the Google box and hitting the Google search button.

How about using this week to transform weak searches into strong outcomes? Just for this week, if you use Google, I encourage you to click on the advanced search link to the right of the search box. This will take you to a page to refine your search.

Here are at least 13 ways to advance your search skills:

1. with all the words
2. with the exact phrase
3. with at least one of the words
4. without the words
5. by 10, 20, 30, 50 or 100 results
6. in specific languages from Arabic to Vietnamese
7. in formats such as Microsoft PowerPoint or Adobe Acrobat
8. first seen in the past 24 hours up to the past year
9. from appearing anywhere on the page to the title or the URL
10. by the type of domain (.com .org .ca etc.)
11. usage rights from free to share or use even commercially to not filtered by license
12. by page specific searches
13. by topic specific searches

Try it for a week and you might just find you use it for a lifetime of searching.

Obviously, this was not a radical new idea for searching but a strong reminder of a resource that was just one click away but you simply forgot or failed to use.

A slacker manager is not a lazy manager. Slacker managers will take an extra step or a few moments to focus their thinking to increase both the effectiveness and efficiency of their information search.

This was written on a Saturday and I’m off to search for golf balls that I will inevitably slice into the trees. Perhaps in the future Google Earth will be able to help me with this search too. FORE!

David Zinger is 1/2 of Slacker Manager

and a hack golfer in search of a better game.

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POSTED IN: management, web/tech