Yes, of course you know that you can search for pretty much any item or piece of information by using the Google search bar. But did you know there are all kinds of cool basic things you can use Google for? Let’s look at them.
Search within a website
Go to Google.com. In the search bar, enter this: site:www.website.com
You can follow that with a keyword, like “subscribe”. For example: site:www.website.com subscribe
If your canonical URL uses www or http or blog or info, enter that in. If you don’t you’ll get different results than if you do. Need to understand more about canonical URLs? We have a great, easy to understand blog post just about that: “What It Means to Use Canonical URLs”
Searching for “site:website.com subscribe”will bring up all results for the domain website.com that include the word subscribe. If you just want to search in your blog or some other subdomain of your site, type in, for example, “site:blog.website.com subscribe”, which will being up only mentions of the word subscribe on your blog.
This could be a handy way to see how many times you have used the “subscribe” call to action. You can use this trick to search for any information on your site that you’re not sure how else to find.
You can further narrow down your results by putting in a year. Let’s say you want to find out what calls to action you used when you first started your blog a few years ago. Enter in that year after “subscribe” and you’ll gt results only for that year.
Most people know that they can use quote marks to search for an exact phrase. But did you know that you can also use an asterisk within quotes to search for an unknown or a variable word? The asterisk will return all variations of the phrase that you typed in. This is helpful if you can’t remember the exact phrase you’re searching for, like a quote from someone or a song lyric you can’t make out all the way. Or, you can use it to search for genuinely unknown things like “fastest * in the world.”
Search on social media
You don’t have to go to each social media platform to look for someone or something. Put an @ or hashtag in front of your search term to search on social media. The words must be one word. For instance, @GwenStefani will return all mentions of Gwen Stefani, but @Gwen Stefani will return results for all mentions of Gwen.
Search for a price or a number range
Put a $ in front of a number to search for a price. This us useful if you’re searching for a camera, for instance, at a particular price. Use a .. in between numbers or a price range to search for numbers or prices within that range. For instance, search for camera $100..$200 to find cameras that are above $100 but under $200.
Use a minus to exclude words
Use a minus symbol (-) in any search where you want to avoid certain words. For instance, if you want only mentions of Apple computers and not Apple phones, search Apple -phones.
Unit conversions and basic math
No need to open up your calculator for these tasks. You can enter basic math equations right into the search bar and Google will perform the calculations for you. If you want to convert pints to liters, just start typing the quantity and the unit (4 pints) and Google will automatically suggest an answer in liters. Type in your conversion question such as “4 cm to inches” and hit enter. A conversion calculator will pop up with the answer already calculated.
