Get the most out of Google search: Talking Tech podcast
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Hey there, listeners. It's Brett Molina. Welcome back to Talking Tech. So how often would you say you use Google? Me personally, I use it obviously every day. I feel like I use it a lot, multiple times a day. I'm always looking up something and I feel like a lot of people are in that same boat. I mean, there's always something you have to look up, whether it's a recipe, a score, you're looking up a certain story, whatever it is may be. You're probably on Google a lot. So of course, it's nice to know some tips and tricks on how to search effectively and find what it is you're exactly looking for while you're on Google. Tech columnist, Kim Komando writes about this in a story you can read on tech.usatoday.com. She offers 10 Google search tricks to help you find what you're looking for. We'll offer three right here. We're not going to go through all 10. If you want to get all 10, you can go straight to usatoday.com and get more. But let's focus on three that she puts out right away that I think are super useful.
First, let's start with filtering search results by date. So this is pretty interesting. Basically, you want to find specific stories or topics, or information from within a certain time period. One of the things you can do is you start by typing in whatever it is you're looking for. You'll see a tiny marking for tools. You click on that and then it'll show you, you can click any time. And basically what that does is it allows you to click within a certain in time period. So you can look at any time, you can look at within the last week, within the last month, or you can customize it. So if you want to look, say for certain search results from like 2018 to 2019, you can do that and it gives you start and end dates, and it'll give you results specifically to those dates. So really useful if there's something you're looking for from a couple years ago, but you're not actually sure where to find it.
The other tip that she offers is excluding keywords. So, you might be searching for a topic, but there are certain words you want to remove from that search. What you can do is, whenever you do that, you place a minus sign right before the word that you want to exclude. So again, very simple, you type in your search, also then type in a minus sign and the word, and what it'll do is it'll search for that specific thing without searching for the word that you have highlighted.
The third thing you can do is search for files. So this is an interesting one. Anytime you go to search on Google, it'll pull up a ton of different stuff. So obviously webpages, documents, everything you need. Let's say you're looking for like a PDF of something specific. You put in your search and then you type in file type, all one word, colon, and then whatever it is the file is. So if you're looking for a PDF for example, you would type in your search, then type in filetype:PDF and you pull it up. And you can do it for any kind of file. If you have an Excel sheet, if there's a word document, whatever it is may be, you can do that specifically and it'll help you find exactly what it is you're looking for.
To learn more about Google search, find out some more tips on how to make the most of it, be sure to read the rest of Kim's column on tech.usatoday.com. Listeners, let's hear from you. Do you have any comments, questions, or show ideas? Any tech problems you want us to try to address? You can find me on Twitter, @brettmolina23. Please don't forget to subscribe and rate us, or leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, anywhere you get your podcasts. You've been listening to Talking Tech. We'll be back tomorrow with another quick hit from the world of tech.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Get the most out of Google search: Talking Tech podcast
