Google is clearly the best general-purpose search engine on the Web

But most people don’t use it to its best advantage. Do you just plug in a keyword or two and hope for the best? That may be the quickest way to search, but with more than 3 billion pages in Google’s index, it’s still a struggle to pare results to a manageable number.

But Google is an remarkably powerful tool that can ease and enhance your Internet exploration. Google’s search options go beyond simple keywords, the Web, and even its own programmers. Let’s look at some of Google’s lesser-known options.

Syntax Search Tricks

Using a special syntax is a way to tell Google that you want to restrict your searches to certain elements or characteristics of Web pages. Google has a fairly complete list of its syntax elements at

www.google.com/help/operators.html

. Here are some advanced operators that can help narrow down your search results.

Intitle: at the beginning of a query word or phrase (intitle:”Three Blind Mice”) restricts your search results to just the titles of Web pages.

Intext: does the opposite of intitle:, searching only the body text, ignoring titles, links, and so forth. Intext: is perfect when what you’re searching for might commonly appear in URLs. If you’re looking for the term HTML, for example, and you don’t want to get results such as

www.mysite.com/index.html

, you can enter intext:html.

Link: lets you see which pages are linking to your Web page or to another page you’re interested in. For example, try typing in

link:http://www.pcmag.com

Try using site: (which restricts results to top-level domains) with intitle: to find certain types of pages. For example, get scholarly pages about Mark Twain by searching for intitle:”Mark Twain”site:edu. Experiment with mixing various elements; you’ll develop several strategies for finding the stuff you want more effectively. The site: command is very helpful as an alternative to the mediocre search engines built into many sites.

Swiss Army Google

Google has a number of services that can help you accomplish tasks you may never have thought to use Google for. For example, the new calculator feature

(www.google.com/help/features.html#calculator)

lets you do both math and a variety of conversions from the search box. For extra fun, try the query “Answer to life the universe and everything.”

Let Google help you figure out whether you’ve got the right spelling—and the right word—for your search. Enter a misspelled word or phrase into the query box (try “thre blund mise”) and Google may suggest a proper spelling. This doesn’t always succeed; it works best when the word you’re searching for can be found in a dictionary. Once you search for a properly spelled word, look at the results page, which repeats your query. (If you’re searching for “three blind mice,” underneath the search window will appear a statement such as Searched the web for “three blind mice.”) You’ll discover that you can click on each word in your search phrase and get a definition from a dictionary.

Suppose you want to contact someone and don’t have his phone number handy. Google can help you with that, too. Just enter a name, city, and state. (The city is optional, but you must enter a state.) If a phone number matches the listing, you’ll see it at the top of the search results along with a map link to the address. If you’d rather restrict your results, use rphonebook: for residential listings or bphonebook: for business listings. If you’d rather use a search form for business phone listings, try Yellow Search

(www.buzztoolbox.com/google/yellowsearch.shtml).

Extended Googling

Google offers several services that give you a head start in focusing your search. Google Groups

(http://groups.google.com)

indexes literally millions of messages from decades of discussion on Usenet. Google even helps you with your shopping via two tools: Froogle

(http://froogle.google.com),

which indexes products from online stores, and Google Catalogs

(http://catalogs.google.com),

which features products from more 6,000 paper catalogs in a searchable index. And this only scratches the surface. You can get a complete list of Google’s tools and services at

www.google.com/options/index.html

You’re probably used to using Google in your browser. But have you ever thought of using Google outside your browser?

Google Alert

(www.googlealert.com)

monitors your search terms and e-mails you information about new additions to Google’s Web index. (Google Alert is not affiliated with Google; it uses Google’s Web services API to perform its searches.) If you’re more interested in news stories than general Web content, check out the beta version of Google News Alerts

(www.google.com/newsalerts).

This service (which is affiliated with Google) will monitor up to 50 news queries per e-mail address and send you information about news stories that match your query. (Hint: Use the intitle: and source: syntax elements with Google News to limit the number of alerts you get.)

Google on the telephone? Yup. This service is brought to you by the folks at Google Labs

(http://labs.google.com),

a place for experimental Google ideas and features (which may come and go, so what’s there at this writing might not be there when you decide to check it out). With Google Voice Search

(http://labs1.google.com/gvs.html),

you dial the Voice Search phone number, speak your keywords, and then click on the indicated link. Every time you say a new search term, the results page will refresh with your new query (you must have JavaScript enabled for this to work). Remember, this service is still in an experimental phase, so don’t expect 100 percent success.

In 2002, Google released the Google API (application programming interface), a way for programmers to access Google’s search engine results without violating the Google Terms of Service. A lot of people have created useful (and occasionally not-so-useful but interesting) applications not available from Google itself, such as Google Alert. For many applications, you’ll need an API key, which is available free from

www.google.com/apis

. See the figures for two more examples, and visit

www.pcmag.com/solutions

for more.

Thanks to its many different search properties, Google goes far beyond a regular search engine. Give the tricks in this article a try. You’ll be amazed at how many different ways Google can improve your Internet searching.

Online Extra: More Google Tips

Here are a few more clever ways to tweak your Google searches.

Search Within a Timeframe

Daterange: (start date–end date). You can restrict your searches to pages that were indexed within a certain time period. Daterange: searches by when Google indexed a page, not when the page itself was created. This operator can help you ensure that results will have fresh content (by using recent dates), or you can use it to avoid a topic’s current-news blizzard and concentrate only on older results. Daterange: is actually more useful if you go elsewhere to take advantage of it, because daterange: requires Julian dates, not standard Gregorian dates. You can find converters on the Web (such as http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/JulianDate.html), but an easier way is to do a Google daterange: search by filling in a form at

www.researchbuzz.com/toolbox/goofresh.shtml or www.faganfinder.com/engines/google.shtml

If one special syntax element is good, two must be better, right? Sometimes. Though some operators can’t be mixed (you can’t use the link: operator with anything else) many can be, quickly narrowing your results to a less overwhelming number.

More Google API Applications

Staggernation.com offers three tools based on the Google API. The Google API Web Search by Host (GAWSH) lists the Web hosts of the results for a given query

(www.staggernation.com/gawsh/).

When you click on the triangle next to each host, you get a list of results for that host. The Google API Relation Browsing Outliner (GARBO) is a little more complicated: You enter a URL and choose whether you want pages that related to the URL or linked to the URL

(www.staggernation.com/garbo/).

Click on the triangle next to an URL to get a list of pages linked or related to that particular URL. CapeMail is an e-mail search application that allows you to send an e-mail to google@capeclear.com with the text of your query in the subject line and get the first ten results for that query back. Maybe it’s not something you’d do every day, but if your cell phone does e-mail and doesn’t do Web browsing, this is a very handy address to know.

Wonderful tacticts 600-800 visitors
Go to http://groups.google.com/ and click on the link near the bottom of the page that says ‘Browse all groups’.

You can do some serious targeting here, so just look around and visit/bookmark several that you have some sort of interest in, or some knowledge about… this does not need to be business related in the slightest way.

Now that you have a few groups bookmarked, go back to one of them and click on an article that you want to make a comment in.

Its going to tell you that you must sign-in, so just sign-in using one of your gmail accounts (if you don’t have a gmail account, you can get one at www.gmail.google.com)

Next, it will ask you for a nick name to use on your posts…That’s it! — Now you are all set to post comments!

Now, take a moment to read his post - then formulate a reasonable reply (that’s easy enough - we all have opinions and/or questions about just about everything).

Now, here are a couple of things I have discovered…

Posting my comments on some topics I tend to get more traffic when I actually use my sig at the top of my post rather than the bottom (I haven’t found any reason for this, it just does) Other posts, it work better to put it on bottom where it is generally expected to be.

I have also recently started putting “Quotes” in my comment, and then my sig right under the quote, than a few lines of my reply above as well as under the quote. (quote= you know how when you post a comment on a forum, you can “quote” who you are commenting on… this is what I am talking about)

Something like… blah blah blah about what ever their post is about, and then I say, here is a little bit of information I also found concerning this.. -this is where I put the quote- and now my sig file… and then drop down a couple of lines and finish my reply.

Next, I have tried using small snippets of ad copy and/or witty sayings, but none produce the results that a standard sig file produce (at least for me).

NOFOLLOW .. the links you get are nofollow… don’t worry about that… All it means is that you aren’t going to bleed any pagerank from the page/site you are leaving your link on… that’s no big deal because you are getting actual humans seeing your link, and you are getting spidered because of your link.

Now as a general rule of thumb I do two types of links in my comments…

-1- If I am posting in a thread that has recent activity, then I use my normal style of commenting.

-2- If I am posting in a thread that has had no activity for quite a long while, then I hardly comment at all… I just put a bunch on links (20 or less) in my internal site pages and sprinkle in some text to avoid filters, and boom - Instant spider bait designed to get google spiders into deeper points of my sites so that I of course end up getting what is known as deep indexing.

Now simply start clicking on those bookmarks and posting comments on all of those discussions you found/saved earlier.

Be Aware — Google will ban you for a while if you post to many comments to quickly… So, once they put their little temporary ban on you, just sign out, and then sign back in again using a different gmail account :-).

Keep doing this — Find more places to post comments in, and also go back and re-comment on the ones you have already commented on before if you want to. (personally, I don’t save a list of where I have commented - I just comment and leave :-).

Its super fast and easy to get a lot of comments out there, which means getting a lot of links back to your own page out there :-)

You can get a metric ton of exposure using this method, and its a stable marketing tactic that will be around for many years to come!

And a little bonus is that people tend to be somewhat fanatical in certain topics, so once you hit one of those, you will see a nice surge in hits to your site because those people don’t just ’skim’ that topic, they devour it, and when you have a link to your site, they go visit to see who you are.

Granted, if you aren’t targeting then this may not get you a lot of sales, but then, even a single sale for every 100-200 non-targeted visitors using this method is still more than you are getting from them right now!

Here a nice little trick you can use to download youtube video without using any software or script...

replace the .COM in the youtube url with .DR.AG

example links

original:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=SpVMCRtqhro

change to:

http://youtube.dr.ag/watch?v=SpVMCRtqhro

notice, on the bottom it even offers you to download & convert the video Smile


Have fun :)

Here's a nice trick i found 100% work to find free quality movie at google.

ust add this in the old browser and start looking For all kinds of movies

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=genre%3AMOVIE_FEATURE&hl=en

this is the code: genre:MOVIE_FEATURE

Have fun

See the thumbnail above. How can you easily do it? You can make a print screen of the website and edit it to thumbnail size using a photo editor and upload it to blogger OR you can just use a simple, single line of code to do it?. Which one you prefer?. Of course the second one right? :)

Here’s the code for displaying thumbnails of any site inside your website:

<img src=”http://msnsearch.srv.girafa.com/srv/i?s=MSNSEARCH&r=http://www.google.com” alt=”Google Thumbnail” />

Change the url and alt to your own.