A regular post of tips to help you work more easily at your keyboard
No. 2 Better Googling
Most people use Google to search the web but not always as smartly as they could. Firstly, via the ‘more’ dropdown at the top you can restrict your search to specific site categories (such as blogs). Many people forget to use quote marks when they want an exact phrase. “Frank Hobson” will only find people with that name. Without the quotes you get every Frank and every Hobson.
Colons are very useful, but not well known. Type your search term into the bar followed by a space then site:site name – eg, searchword site:hobsonconsult.co.uk (note: no www. needed) will search only on my site. If you cannot remember the full site name use inurl: thus inurl:hobson will find only those sites with hobson somewhere in the URL. If you want to search specific types of site put the URL ending after the colon eg searchword :ac.uk, or :edu or :gov.uk. If you need to track a flight just type the flight number (eg,BA123) into the search bar.
Good Googling.
Posted by Frank Hobson 