Google is indeed a buzzword in the world of internet. Today, almost everyone is on the web and Google is the most visited website for searching anything (as google is a search engine). No matter what you’re looking for, you start with a simple search.
To put a number on it,
- Google has been visited 90.89 billion times this year (Similarweb, 2021).
- Google dominates the search engine market. In fact, as of June 2021, Google holds 92.18 percent of the market share (Gs.statcounter, 2021).
- Google now processes over 40,000 search queries every second on average (visualize them here), which translates to over 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide.
- Google processes over 7.2 billion searches per day (Internetlivestats, 2021).
- When we take a look at the number of Google searches based on the device, 73 percent of Google’s US organic search traffic originated from mobile devices (Merkleinc, 2021).
- As of October 2019, Facebook was the most searched keyword on Google (Ahrefs, 2019).
- As of today, Youtube is the most searched keyword on Google (Ahrefs, 2021).
Let’s keep these data’s aside and talk about optimizing google search. Do you want to know how to use google search in an effective way? Let’s get through some techniques to use during google search.
- Use a hyphen to exclude words
Sometimesyou might be searching for a word with an ambiguous meaning. An example is Mustang. When you Google search for Mustang, you may get results for the car made by Ford or Mustang District in Nepal. If you want to cut one out, use the hyphen to tell the engine to ignore content with one of the other. See the example below.
- Mustang -cars
This tells the search engine to search for mustangs but to remove any results that have the word “car” in it. It can be wildly helpful when finding information about something without getting information about something else.
- Find quick answers
For many searches, Google will do the work for you and show an answer to your question in the search results. Some features, like information about sports teams, aren’t available in all regions.
- Weather: Search weather to see the weather in your location or add a city name, like weather Kathmandu, to find weather for a certain place.
- Dictionary: Put a define keyword in front of any word to see its definition.
- Calculations: Enter a math equation like 123*123456, or solve complex graphing equations.
- Unit conversions: Enter any conversion, like 3 dollars in euros.
- Translate: Enter any phrase, like translate hello to nepali.
- Sports: Search for the name of your team to see a schedule, game scores and more.
- Quick facts: Search for the name of a celebrity, location, movie, or song to find related information.
- Common search techniques
You can use symbols or words in your search to make your search results more precise. Google Search usually ignores punctuation that isn’t part of a search operator. Don’t put spaces between the symbol or word and your search term. A search for site:thequickblog.com will work, but site: thequickblog.com won’t.
- Search social media
- Put @ in front of a word to search social media.
- For example: @twitter.
- Search for a price
- Put $ in front of a number.
- For example: iPhone 7 $400.
- Search hashtags
- Put # in front of a word.
- For example: #travelingnepal
- Search for an exact match
- Put a word or phrase inside quotes.
- For example, “highest peak of the world”.
- Search within a range of numbers
- Put .. between two numbers.
- For example, a Laptop $150..$500.
- Combine searches
- Put “OR” between each search query.
- For example, a marathon OR race.
- Search for a specific site
- Put “site:” in front of a site or domain.
- For example, site:youtube.com or site:.gov.np
- Search for related sites
- Put “related:” in front of a web address you already know.
- For example, related:thequickblog.com
- See Google’s cached version of a site
- Put “cache:” in front of the site address.