Do you know how to search?

I came across an awesome blog post by Holly Clark on the website edudemic.com about the importance of teaching our students to search correctly, it made me realize that many of us does not know these quick and easy tricks to get better search results, so here they are be sure to try them out yourself! For those of you that want to geek out some more an learn more about exact searches here are some more tips that I found on the Googles tips page: http://www.google.com/insidesearch/tipstricks/all.html

http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/insidesearch/tipstricks/all.html

Quotation Marks:

Always use quotes to search for an exact word or set of words. This is useful when you want something like quotes, song lyrics or text from a an exact historical time period.

Example: “The Great Chicago Fire”

Keep in mind that searching with quotes might exclude relevant results. For instance, a search for "Alexander Bell" will miss pages that refer to Alexander G. Bell.

Include or ignore words and characters in your search

Highlight common words and characters such as the and& if they are essential to your search (as in a movie or book title) by putting quotation marks "the" around them. You can also use the minus - sign to specify particular items you don't want in your results, like ingredients in a recipe.

Two Periods:

Use this to help you find information between those two numbers. For example you might want to try:

• Example: Great Chicago Fire October 8..10

Search within a specific site

Precede your query with site: if you know you want your answer from within a specific site or type of site (.org, .edu). For example: site:edu or site:nytimes.com.

Search for an address:

To map any location, type in the city name or zip code followed by the word [map], and you'll see a map of that location. Click on the map to see it on Google Maps

Search by file type

Search for specific types of files, such as PDFs, PPTs, or XLS, by adding filetype: and the 3-letter file abbreviation. 

try it: affordable health care act filetype:ppt

Get the time

To see what time it is anywhere in the world, search time and the city or country.

Check the weather

Search weather followed by a U.S. zip code or the name of any city in the world to get the current weather and forecast. Enter weather by itself to get the weather report for your current location.
Search “weather chicago”

Get number conversion
Convert any measurement -- like miles to kilometers or ounces to liters -- by typing in the number and unit of measurement.
Search “miles to km”