Do You Know How To Google?

Here are four tips from Randolph Hock, author of The Extreme Searcher’s Internet Handbook (Information Today; $25) on the best way to Google on Google:

To Find: PDFs, Excel spreadsheets or Power Point Presentations-

Use: filetype:pdf, filetype:xls, or filetype:ppt

Example: Beauty manual filetype:pdf

Why: If you include the filetype in your search, Google will turn up only relevant files.

To Find: A product you saw online (but can’t remember where)

Use: intitle:

Example: intitle: “Tory Burch boots”

Why: Using the term intitle: searches the words in the title bar of Web pages and can be especially helpful if you recall the name of a product you liked but not where you found it. Note: Don’t put a space after the colon and use quotation marks around the search phrase.

To Find: A verbatim phrase

Use: quotation marks

Example: “spa retreat”

Why: Using quotation marks around a phrase or a person’s name can eliminate many of the irrelevant links you would otherwise see pop up, states Hock.

To Find: Narrowed-Down Information

Use: a hyphen (minus sign)

Example: jaguar -cars -football

Why: You want information about jaguars-the animal, not the car and or the sports team. Placing a hyphen before terms you want to exclude will omit pages with those words. Note: Type a space before the hyphen, but not after.

Here are 7 things you can do directly in the Google search field:

• perform calculations- To figure out what 10 percent off that $48 skirt amounts to, just enter “48x.10″ into the search field, click “search,” and the answer will show up at the top of the page. No additional clicking required.
• convert measurements-How many cups equal a gallon? Simple type “cups in gallon”; You can also find out currency conversions (”20 dollars in pesos”)
• track flights-Find out if your flight is on time by entering your airline and flight number.
• locate packages-Missing that important shoe shipment? Enter “track” plus the tracking number for a direct link to the status page
• look up addresses-Type in a person’s home phone number and, if they’re listed, Google will turn up the mailing address
• find movie showtimes-Type “movies” plus your city or zip code to see theaters and showtimes for the next three days
• listen to music-Thanks to a Google partnership with music site lala.com, you can type the title of a song and its artist and a playable file will appear at the top of the results page.