How to google ?

Another "practical" guide for research

Google is one of the most powerful information acquiring tool of the century and this is not really a secret anymore. There are many articles on "tips and tricks" to use Google or "top Google secrets", and this one might be considered one of those. Many self-taught developers and such use it daily and I personally am no exception. Google is just that good at what it does.

Now, how exactly do you Google?

1. The common way

"How to Google" would be a perfect google search for someone with no clue on how to use the search engine (hehe, loophole).

• Step1: Get a web browser (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Duckduckgo Edge, Duckduckgo....) and make sure it's installed on your machine with internet access. Most computers come with a pre-installed browser so you might not need to install one yourself.
• Step2: Open your browser and type www.google.com in the address bar and press enter.
• Step3: type your search query in the search bar and press enter.

The average person just formulate their search query as they would ask it to the closest person, like "how to boil an egg" or "what is the capital of France" or "why is the sky blue"... And that works...until you need very specific information.

2. The advanced method

Google itself helps you using its engine efficiently and how to refine your queries. They explain how to do advanced search, reverse image search, and how to use search filters... They have a whole page dedicated to that, it's called Google search help, and their tool here can help you refine your search queries.

Here are some examples of advanced search queries:

• site:example.com to search only in a specific website.
• filetype:pdf to search only for pdf files.
• intitle:keyword to search for a specific keyword in the title of the page.
• related:example.com to search for websites similar to a specific website.
• cache:example.com to see the cached version of a website.
• define:word to get the definition of a word.
• weather:city to get the weather of a specific city.
• stocks:company to get the stock information of a specific company.
• time:city to get the time of a specific city.
• movie:movie_name to get information about a specific movie.
• book:book_name to get information about a specific book.

That's it... that's basically all you needed. Congratulations you are now a Google search expert. You can combine those queries to get even more specific results. For example, site:example.com intitle:keyword will search for a specific keyword in the title of a specific website. It's actually the basics for the dark arts of Google Dorking (Google it).

3. The researcher's method

If you are a professional and need to use Google as such, you need to hone your google-fu skills even further. Google have multiple subdomains dedicated to different types of products. Be you a student or a researcher, Google scholar is for you. If you are a school teacher, Google for education's tools might be useful. Let's say you need only books results... well, here you go.

There are many more. Developers and designers have tools dedicated to their dreadful activities too. Actually google went from a simple search engine to a whole ecosystem of tools and services. You can check all of that here. Google forgot no one.

4. The next trend

Google and other search engines made a great impact in the early days of internet and are still a big thing today. But things change and with the increase of AI people now talk about chatGPT. Unlike most people, I don't really intend to write a whole article about it but in my opinion chatGPT and such are great research tools but, search results should be taken carefully as they can always convey inaccurate information (even Google search results can be inaccurate). you need some common sense plus cross-checking (using multiple reliable sources) to make sure you are not being misinformed.

Did you know that most people don't think about searching basic things on Google (source: dude, trust me) while some people basically live from hundreds of Google search a day? (hello, tech people).

I personally wrote this article making Google searches about how to Google. Basically like, here, Let me Google it for you.

End of the line

It's no secret anymore that Google is a powerful research tool and way more than a simple search engine. Some people still don't know how to use it to it's fullest extent. The solution is actually simple. Start Googling more. The more you use it the more familiar you get with the tool and the more "secret tricks" you will learn.

Many of those were not covered in this short article (Fun Google Easter eggs, Google SEO tricks...) because the main goal here is to quickly give you an idea of how good Google is. You only get better at using it by... well, using it.