Want to improve your Google search skills?
Here are the three tips — basic, intermediate and advanced — from Dan Russell at Google. He studies how people use the search engine and teaches classes on how to do it better, including a free online course this month, for which registration started Tuesday. He promises these tips will make you happy, and he cares a lot about that — his official title at Google is über tech lead for search quality and user happiness.
Basic tip:
Say you know you were mentioned in an article online, so you search to read what was said about you. But when you click on the link, you get the entire article and no idea where to find
your name. The solution is simple: Control- F. Typing those two keys allows you to enter a term to find it anywhere it appears on the Web page. Ninety percent of United States Internet users do not know how to find
the word they are looking for on a Web page, according to Mr. Russell’s studies. “Control F changes the way you read anything.”
Intermediate tip:
You tried to snowboard and ended up back at your computer with a possibly broken arm. Instead of typing “What do I do with a busted arm” into Google, try to use
words that you imagine someone else would have written about broken arms, Mr. Russell said. “Put yourself in the mind of the author of a perfect Web page,” he said. “Emulate the language of
the person you want to read the answer from.” But do not take that too far, by making up words that you think are expert, but are not real words. “Don’t overdo it using words you think are medical,
like ‘fracturated,’ because you will find results, at which point you’ll be in even bigger trouble,” Mr. Russell said. Which leads us to his final tip.
Advanced tip:
Before you ask Google what to do with a “fracturated” arm, look up the word, or any word, by typing “define:” followed by the word. Mr. Russell advises
promiscuous use of the word “define” followed by colon. “Before you search, make sure you’re searching the right word. The worst thing you can do is to search for something you think
means one thing but in fact means something else, but you believe the answer when you asked the wrong question.”