by Mario Brizic

Created on: August 25, 2010   Last Updated: December 21, 2010

Over the past few years, Google has become more than just an ordinary search engine. Now, you can use it to check out what weather will be like this weekend, or what movie plays in your local cinema. You can even use built-in calculator, and calculate variety of mathemathic expressions, ranging from 2+2=4 to the most complicated trigonometrical functions!

But, first things first. Probably the most useful thing is called 'Basic Operators'. Don't worry, it's not that hard as it seems. It's just a way of refining your search results. Let me start with an example. If you try to 'Google' your name, let's say you're named 

Marc Gregory Young. If you type just that, you probably won't find the page you're looking for.

1.) Basic operator 1 - Quotation marks (" ")

However, if you type "Marc Gregory Young" this way, with quotations, the page you were looking for will come as a first search result. Whoops. It seems that this man really does exist, even though I chose the name randomly. Change the name if you don't like this stalking feeling.

You see, in the first search you told Google to search for page which contains the words "Marc", "Gregory" and "Young". What you did in the second search was actually 'refining' your search result, by searching for exact phrase "Marc Gregory Young", instead of just few unconnected words.

2.) Basic operator 2 - Minus ( - ) and plus ( + ) sign

Let's say you're looking for a Marc's phone number. You can do that by typing "Marc Gregory Young" +phone". This search will list all pages which contain the phrase "Marc Gregory Young" and the word "phone". However, in this situation, the sign + is not necessary. You can try searching without plus sign.

If for some reason you want to avoid pages that contain his phone number, you can repeat the search with swapping plus sign for minus sign. Like this way: "Marc Gregory Young" -phone". Simple, isn't it?

3.) Basic operator 3 - OR

If you really have to get in a contact with our friend Marc, you can also try searching for his e-mail address, MySpace profile, or real life address. In this situation, Basic Operator 3 will come in handy. Try Googling this: "marc gregory young" phone OR e-mail. This way, Google will list all the pages that contain his name and his e-mail or phone number.

4.) Basic operator 4 - Star ( * )

It's used instead of a word, if you don't know what word you're looking for, or you just can't remember it. Let's try. " * R50" will find us one car (Touareg R50), laptop (IMB Thinkpad

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