by Hernani Cerqueira

Created on: July 24, 2009

Google is the world favorite search engine. It indexes everything that is allowed to and gives us the possibility to search its database for the indexed WebPages. Although this is basic and straightforward info, many of our searches are very basic as well. But the big G offers us the possibility narrow the searches using some modifiers.

First thing to know about are double quotes. Have you ever tried to make a search on some person's name? Searching for John Doe will also retrieve some list with the names John Duncan and William Doe in it, because Google is not aware that you're looking specifically for a name compounded by John and Doe. All you have to do is to use double quotes. Searching for "John Doe" will only retrieve that specific sentence. This is particular useful if you're searching for some quote or error message.

Also, our friend name could appear somewhere as Doe, John. Because we want all possible info about him, we must compound a search using conditional modifiers. The search "John Doe" OR "Doe, John" would return all results that contain either one form or the other of presenting the name. Notice that in this example we also used another feature, which is the possibility to mix several modifiers in one search.

But the results keep showing some guy from Washington that shares the name with John, who we know is not from there. We could use the minus (-) sign to exclude the word Washington from the results, like "John Doe" -Washington.

What about our friend's girlfriend, Mary Michelle, we want to look for every reference that includes both, so we could use "John Doe" AND "Mary Michelle", and Google would retrieve only the results were both names appear. But we could go a bit further, watch this: ("John Doe" OR "Doe, John") AND ("Mary Michelle" OR "Michelle, Mary"). Awesome uh, we're telling Google we want all the results were both names appear in either form, the parentheses are used like on a math equation; content inside of them is calculated first.

We now want to know which car John owns. We do know that he has a very busy cyber life so that information must be written somewhere, but the search John Doe's car, shows no relevant results. Maybe instead of car we should use automobile or vehicle, or maybe we have the chance to look for everything at the same time. This brings us the tilde (~) modifier, which indicates Google to look for any synonym of the forwarding word. Our search now becomes John Doe's ~car, or even better, "John Doe's ~car".

And what about the car he used to drive back in the year 2000. Or was in 2002? Well, we have a new modifier to the rescue, two full stops (..) to be exact. This allows us to search between a range of numbers, so we could just search for "John Doe's ~car" 2000..2002 and that would do the trick. We can even use that for currency, like $500..$1000.

After some hours searching about John, we realized he's a fictional character used to describe some anonymous person, although there are real people with that name. Our disappointment is huge but we do at least want some information about him as defined in online dictionaries and encyclopedias. Let's just type define: John Doe on Google search box and there we have, Wikipedia, Wordnet and maybe some others definitions of John Doe, all in one page.

Google can also be used as a calculator or an online conversion tool, or even as a currency converter. Take a quick look at the official Google Search Features page for all the options.

Time is money, so let me just see how much money I spent Googling about John. Let me Google 17USD*3 in EURO. What? 35 Euros, damn it John...

Learn more about this author, Hernani Cerqueira.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.