Nowadays, a lot of people around the world use search engines to find information, entertainment, content and other things online. Search engines like Google have become much more sophisticated in the last couple of years.
Google understands search intent and is even capable of processing natural language to provide better and more relevant results. If you were to search for the best online casinos in Finland, for instance, Google would provide you with all the websites that rank for that keyword, which is a lot of results.
But if you’re looking to narrow down your search, that’s a completely different story. That being said, sometimes you can’t find that article you’ve read some time ago or the news you saw on one of your favorite websites.
No matter what you do, the thing you’re looking for is not there anymore. It’s there, you just need to work the search engine in your favor. With that in mind, here’s how to make Google search work for you.
Searching for specific sites
Google actually makes it easy to find specific websites you’ve read an article or a blog post on even if you can’t remember the name of the article or post.
You might do a manual search through website directories but that could take forever. Instead you should use a specific phrase in your Google search to find what you’re looking for.
For example, simply add “site:www.randomwebsite.com” after you’ve chosen a search query. If you were looking for an article about healthy snacks written by Forbes, for instance, your search would look something like this: “Healthy Snack site:www.forbes.com”.
This will allow Google to filter search results with relevant articles from a specific website allowing you to find what you need with ease.
Specifying content type
When you search for something online, Google will provide you with website articles and blog posts by default. Sometimes, it may even suggest videos on YouTube as relevant results.
However, if you don’t want any of that as your search result, you can specify the content type you’d like to see. As you may know by now, many online companies have various content formats they promote using SEO and other marketing strategies, you just need to know how to find specific content.
All you have to do is add “filetype:content” next to your search query. For example, if you’re looking for images about sports just type: “sports”filetype:jpg”. If you need a power point presentation just add ”ppt” next to filetype. The same principle applies for any other content type like PDFs and so on.
Make your search results more relevant
There’s a lot you can do to filter through your search results to make it easier to find something specific that you want to find. Unfortunately, most people don’t know how to do it, which can make searching for something online a lot more frustrating.
For instance, wouldn’t you like to see only relevant results without random factors that would overwhelm your search results? Of course you would. You can do that by adding the “minus” (-) to your search query.
The minus will remove anything you specify from search results. As an example, you want to know more about social media marketing but not on Facebook, you will type “social media marketing strategies – Facebook.
This will provide you with results that focus on other social media platforms with Facebook being excluded from the search results.
Moreover, if you want to search more terms than one you can simply add “or” to your search query. For instance, baking muffins “or” waffles will give you search results that include both recipes instead of searching for them individually.
Closing Words
Oftentimes, search engines like Google seem to be unable to provide us with the results we’re looking for. The main reason is that there are millions of search results that Google might consider relevant to our intent. It’s up to you to filter through those results the way you see fit so that you can actually find what you want.
