Another Search Tip

If you are looking up someone's name, it helps to either type in the "at" sign, as in @tomshubnell or use quote marks, as in "tom shubnell". This narrows down your results, because with no qualifier, your search will yield everything that has either tom or shubnell in it. Either of these qualifiers force it to look for specifically those two names together.

More Google Tips

Google has 12 billion searches per month. Many people try too hard and become frustrated. Using a few tricks makes it much easier to quickly find what you want. For all of these tips, do not type the quote marks.

This is very useful for finding one thing, while eliminating something related - to find a sunbird that is not a car, type "sunbird -car" and Google will eliminate car references or try "beatle -beatles" to get bug info and eliminate the singing group.

Type in a holiday name and it will give you the day and date for the current year.

Put ".." between two numbers and Google will search within that range, as “camera $200..$300” to show cameras within that price range.

To find a definition, type "define:" followed by the word.

If you do not remember a complete headline, book title, song title, etc., fill in the blanks of any search with asterisks (*) and Google will try to complete your search for you.

Search for "Books by" and the name of an author, Google will display all of their works.

If you hit "I'm feeling lucky" without actually typing anything into the search box, you will get a catalog of all the Google doodles.

Google Search Tip

Google's site-specific search; the search company's results are often better than many big operations. This works great on everything from media sites to retail outlets. Just include "site:www.example.com" (replacing example.com with actual site name) along with your search term to get results just from that site.

Google and Facebook

Google will now begin adding Facebook comments that are public and your comments could end up in a Google search. One more reason to watch what you type on Facebook, especially when you type personal information or names. This stuff lasts forever on the web, so it pays to think ahead before you type.

Google What Do You Love

Here is another Google feature that is fun. It is called What Do You Love, or WDYL. Looks like a Google search page, but shows results in categories. It has latest news, books, start a discussion group, pictures, dates for events, blogs, 3D, translation, maps, patents, and more. You can enter a name, word, topic, such as bacon, or anything you can search for in Google. Just another fun way to find out about those things you love.  LINK

Five Ways to Find Someone on the Web

There are a dwindling number of sites that provide name or phone number info for free. Seems we all need to make a living. There are a few interesting sites that provide more information about you than you might like to see. One of them is 123people.com. Type in your name and it spits out a host of information, like pictures, addresses, comments you may have posted on the web, facebook and myspace account info, plus much more. Worth a visit.

Scam callers are an increasing problem but there are a few sites to report the information and you can use them to see if anyone else complained about a particular number. One site Identifycallers lets you post comments and read others comments.

Whitepages.com and yellowpages,com offer name to number and number to name lookups for people or businesses, just as the paper versions do.

Addictomatic is another site that offers a wealth of information, mainly from blogs, tweets, YouTube, Yahoo,  facebook, etc., but not personal info, such as address, phone.

Another Google Search Tip

Use a minus sign right before a word to eliminate it from your search results. For example, if you are looking for cowboys, but not the team, you would type "cowboys -dallas -football" without the quotes. This trick goes a long way toward eliminating information that you are not interested in reading.