This month's HowTo provides some Googling tips and tricks that you may not be aware of.
- To search for a specific phrase, put apostrophes round your search. "How to limit your search" will return results that use exactly that phrase in that order
- When you're not sure exactly what term to use for a search, you can include more than one by using OR so it tries both. Eg Daddy OR chips
- Google has many conversions built into it - far too many to cover here, but as an example, try: £5 in dollars
- If you put site: before your search, you can limit your search to a specific website. So site:bbc.co.uk jelly will search for references to jelly on the BBC site exclusively
- You can put sums into the search bar, and Google will give you the result. It'll even then give you an interactive calculator so you can keep calculating to your heart's content!
- You can search for specific filetypes if necessary. For example, if you know it's a PDF that you're looking for, you can specify document filetype:pdf.
- If you're looking for results within a specific date range, you can specify it within your search thus: mushrooms daterange:201509-201609 will search for articles about mushrooms between september 2015 and september 2016.
- If you're struggling with the definition of a word, Google can help with that. Eg define:definition
- Want to exclude a word from the results? Ant -Dec will return only those results about Ant that don't mention Dec as well.
- Just for fun, try searching for the answer to life, the universe, and everything