Are You Really Beefing up Your Search Skills?
January 18, 2017
Everyone’s New Year’s resolution is usually to lose weight. When January swings around again, that resolution went out the door with the spring-cleaning. Exercise can be a challenge, but you can always exercise your search skills by reading Medium’s article, “Google Search Tricks To Become A Search Power User.” Or at least the article promises to improve your search skills.
Let’s face it, searching on the Web might seem simple, but it requires a little more brainpower than dumping keywords into a search box. Google makes searching easier and is even the Swiss army knife of answering basic questions. The Medium article does go a step further by drawing old school search tips, such as the asterisk, quotes, parentheses, and others. These explanations, however, need to be read more than once to understand how the tools work:
My favorite of all, single word followed by a ‘*’ will do wonders. But yeah this will not narrow your results; still it keeps a wider range of search results. You’ll need to fine tune to find exactly what you want. This way is useful in case when you don’t remember more than a word or two but you still you want to search fully of it.
Having used some of these tips myself, they actually make searching more complicated than taking a little extra time to read the search results. I am surprised that they did not include the traditional Boolean operators that usually work, more or less. Sometimes search tips cause more trouble than they are worth.
Whitney Grace, January 18, 2016
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