Google Search Tips and Tricks

Most of us has been using Google Search for our internet searches. In just a click of a mouse, you can readily get the information you want. But do you know that there are some tricks in improving the results of your Google search? Let me give you some which I have read from other Googlers.

• Force Find.
  Use Quotation marks to force find a specific phrase you need. When you surround your phrase with quotation marks, your telling Google to search for the exact phrase as you type it. Google will only return results exactly matching the entire phrase.
  
  This is an extremely powerful searching technique, however majority of web searchers don't use it.
  
  For example, if you search for the phrase blogging tutorials, you will get 303,000 results. But if you put quotation marks around the entire name, your results will be restricted to about 17,800.
  
  That sounds more maneageable, right?
  
  
• Searching in a Range.
  So, you are searching for Sexy Singles between the age of 18 and 25 or looking for a cake which weighs between 100 and 200 pounds? Google has a way which lets you specify the range you want to find results in.
  
  The trick is to use “..” — double dots — between the range. For example, Cake 100..200 pound or Sexy Singles 18..25 years.
  
  I don’t really want to give the exact query I used to test this trick — I am sure some of you are reading it from work — but don’t forget to specify the unit. Google is smart but not “THAT” smart.
  
  
• Plus and Minus.
  Use the plus (+) and minus (-) signs. The plus sign just before a search term means "This MUST be found in the search".
  
  Conversely, if you find a lot of search results that include a word that you don't want to see, you can put a minus sign before that word, and those results will be excluded from your search.
  
  
• Use Wild Card Term
  You can use an asterisk (*) as a wild card search term. Yes, you can insert an asterisk in your search phrase and it will act as a wild card matching any word in that place in the phrase.
  
  Not only that, but you can insert more than one asterisk in place of more than one word in your search phrase. That's very helpful!
  
  
• Synonym Search.
  Do you want to search for the word and its synonyms at the same time? Thank Google they made it easier for you than you having to search every synonym individually.
  
  You just to add the “~” sign in front of your search term and all synonyms of you search words will be added to your search.
  
  For example if you want to search for funny videos along with its synonyms then just search for ~funny ~videos and Google will return the results for funny videos, stupid videos, crazy videos, funny movies, stupid movies, crazy movies etc. Get the idea?
  
  
• Let Google Define It.
  You can add “define:” in front of a word and Google will find its definitions from around the Web. Just try searching for define:love and you will see what I mean.
  
  

Know More Google Tricks? Add em below.

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Google Friend Connect

Social networks sites has been very common to most people nowadays. I can tell that anyone who knows how to use a computer and the internet is a member of a social network site. Even elementary kids have Friendster accounts and most probably they will ask you, "May friendster ka ba? Add mo naman ako..."

Just look at Friendster, Facebook and Multiply who earn millions of dollars every month. And now Google has joined the social networking game, but in a different approach! A couple of weeks ago, Google announced the launch of Google Friend Connect and has just opened up beta testing to a select number of people. I think this is a big step of Google and will quickly become a contender in this space.

Google Friend Connect is a service that helps website owners grow traffic by enabling any site on the web to easily provide social features for its visitors. With just a few snippets of code, you get more people engaging more deeply with your site. This is one useful tool for bloggers to get more visitors in their site.

Google Friend Connect boasts the following high-level features:

* Attract more visitors to your site - Visitors bring along friends from social networks like Facebook, orkut, and others to interact on your site.

* Enrich your site with social features - Choose engaging social features from a catalog of gadgets provided by Google and the OpenSocial developer community.

* No programming whatsoever - Just copy and paste snippets of code into your site, and Google Friend Connect does the rest.

There are a couple of example sites already setup which you can test and interact with.

If you are interested in participating in the preview release, you can sign-up directly in their site here. I just applied today and hopefully I will get accepted and can start using Google Friend Connect.

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