Thursday, April 8, 2010

14 Tips to Use Google Effectively

Like you I try to read and attempt to keep up with "the information overload" of our profession. To do this, I love "Tip Lists." Short...concise...easy to read...all GOOD for a guy like me. So here is one I just found from a post entitled "How to Use Google Effectively - 14 Tips to Save You Time."

The title says it all..."14 Tips to Save You Time."

It was put together by Donal Daly on Sales 2.0 Network. I hope you can use it:

  1. Use quotation marks for exact phrases. Searching for “The TAS Group”, with the quotation marks, is much more efficient that just searching for The TAS Group, and return far fewer spurious results.
  2. Use ‘OR’ to include more than one search item: Searching for ipod OR mp3 player gives results that contain either ipod or mp3 player.
  3. Placing a ‘-’ in front of a term excludes that word. TAS -Group will give answers that include TAS, but notGroup, so none of the results will have the word Group in them.
  4. Use ‘~’ for synonyms. Searching for ~sales gives you results that contain sales alongside store, retail, etc.
  5. Find items related to a URL: Search related: www.dealmakergenius.com, and your results will include information on The TAS GroupSales 2.0 Network and other related items.
  6. Search for sites that link to one another. If you search link: www.sales20network.com, you will find a list of all the sites that link to this blog. (There are quiet a few!)
  7. Look inside a site. Searching for site:www.sales20network.com trust will find every reference to trust onwww.sales20network.com, or links on other sites that connect to a page on www.sales20network.com that contains the word trust.
  8. Put … between numbers searches for numbers in that range. Searching for ROI 10…30 will generates a list of results that contain ROI and numbers in the range between 10 and 30.
  9. Not case sensitive: Google search is not case sensitive, so searching on tas returns the sames results asTAS.
  10. Get definitions: Using define: sale, will give you definitions of sale from many sources.
  11. Get time or weather: Using time: Dublin, Ireland or weather: Seattle, WA, will quickly figure out time zones, and tell you what time it is now in Dublin, Ireland (alway happy time) or the weather in Seattle, WA (always wet).
  12. Get exchange rates: 150 euros to dollars will (today) return 205.15 U.S. dollars
  13. Quick URL info: You can get info on dealmakergenius.com, by searching on info: dealmakergenius.com.  It will include a short description, links to its cache, similar pages, and sites that link to that URL.
  14. Use Google as a calculator: You can use Google to evaluate many math expressions. Search for365*24*60*60 and will Google tell you the number of seconds in a day (31536000).

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