Gadgetory

being smart isn't just about memorizing information it's also about being able to find the information you need most of us that first point of information retrieval is Google but not every Google search is created equal I'm going to show you some advanced features of Google search that will help you pinpoint exactly what you're looking for the first thing to know is that Google actually has an advanced search page that they kind of hide over at google.com slash advanced underscore search now using that you can search for exact phrases you can define subjects that are going to be excluded from search you can even filter the results by language or region or even filter out explicit content for example let's say we're looking for some Star Wars fan fiction that's written in German and available as a PDF and doesn't mention Jar Jar Binks and for the sake of this video is not pornographic I'll put in fan fiction as the general search term and then Star Wars as a specific search term and I'll say excluding Jar Jar and I'm gonna filter this by the German language turn safe search on and then select PDF as the file type boom it's a lot of German Star Wars fan fiction that doesn't have Jar Jar Binks doing horrible things the great thing about searching this way is that you already have a template for how to structure your search it's great also if you're looking for something pretty complicated and you really want to be able to define the parameters for your search now you can perform a pretty similar search right from the Google homepage if you use some choice punctuation Google calls these search operators and there's dozens of them out there but I'm gonna talk about the ones that are the most useful now let's say you're looking for a specific phrase if you put in quotation marks Google will acknowledge the entire phrase instead of each individual words for example if I want to search for people who are talking about the best doughnut they've ever had I'll type the phrase this is the best doughnut I've ever had inside quotation marks and Google will filter just the results to have those exact words that exact order I see results here from Twitter and if I want to filter those out I could adjust the search by adding a dash or a minus sign in front of the word Twitter or let's say I want my results only from Twitter I could adjust the search by adding site : twitter.com and then I've only got results with that phrase from Twitter finally a few quick tips now Google is not only the most famous search engine in the world it's also a great calculator it can even handle scientific calculations can also handle unit conversions if you want to know how many Ounces are in a gallon just type it in and you got the answer if you want to define a word you can just type in define colon and the word you're looking for and for an easy way to pad your term paper with some impressive citations you can go to scholar.google.com and you're gonna get a searchable index of articles and abstracts and books all from academic publishers so that's it that's how to take your Google search skills up to the next level