Larilyn's Tip of the Week:  Get Better Google Results

Have you ever been with a group of friends or family when a topic comes about that spurs a question? 

Perhaps you are wondering the exact date that Pearl Harbor was bombed.....or you are debating the correct lyrics to a Beatles song.....or you can't remember what the name of Lorelei Gilmore's father was.

And suddenly, someone throws out the suggestion, "hey, let's Google it."  So people break out their phones and start searching.

I don't know about you, but without fail, there are those in the group who start searching and say they can't find the answer.  They scroll and scroll through the results to no avail.  Then there are those in the group who pull their phone out late, type for two seconds and find the answer immediately.

I joke a lot about my ability to find answers because I'm just good at Googling.  But there is actually some truth to that.  There are things you can do to help you get better results in your Google search.

I'm going to give you three things you can do to help improve your Google search results.

The first thing you can do is that if you are looking for something specific, like a quote or song lyrics, you can use quotes.  Let's say you remember one line of a Beatles song, but can't remember the rest of the lyrics - or even the title of the song.  If you put quotation marks around the lyrics you remember, it will narrow down your search results to only results that include that exact quote.  So if you type "now I find I've changed my mind and opened up the doors" - you will get a lot of results pointing you at the hit Help!

The second thing you can do is this:  if you remember that you saw something on a specific website but don't have a direct link, you can search for a specific site.  Let's say you know you saw a hilarious video on YouTube about a duck wanting grapes.  The way you'd search Google for a specific site is that in the search bar you would type site:youtube.com duck grapes.  Notice that there is no space between the colon and the site name.  This will make sure that the results are all from the specific site you knew the information was on.

The third thing you can do is to make sure to exclude words from your search.  In order to do this, you type what you want to search and then use a - to note which word you want to leave out of results.  Like if you want to find out what animals are considered tall.  However, you already know giraffes are tall and so you don't need ten pages of results telling you about giraffes, you'd want to exclude giraffe from your search.  So you would google: tall animals -giraffe

Hopefully this will help you to up your Google game and always be able to find what you are looking for!