Archive for the 'Google' Category

Search Google for Synonyms

Published by Tiposaurus on June 9, 2011 in Google. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

It's possible to search Google for synonyms of a word, ie other words that Google thinks has the same meaning. To do this, simply precede the term by a tilde: ~, for example: ~blog will return results for terms such as weblog and blogger as well as those for blog. If you're only interested in the synonyms then you can exclude the original word in the usual way (ie by prefixing a minus sign: - to the term.

So ~blog -blog will return results for weblog, blogger and log but exclude those with the term blog.

This could be useful from a SEO perspective: if you are writing articles which target certain keywords, then it may be useful to target other words which Google associates with those keywords, too.

Google Currency Conversion

Published by Tiposaurus on April 3, 2011 in Google and Tips. 1 Comment

Google has a currency conversion feature built in to its search, all you have to do is search for 100 GBP in USD, for example, to convert £100 (UK Pounds Sterling) to US Dollars. If you don't know the acronym for the currency you're converting to then don't worry as you can also do conversions with a search like 100 USD in Czech money, if you were planning a trip to the Czech Republic.

Google: Filter By Usage Rights

Published by Tiposaurus on April 3, 2011 in Google and Tips. 0 Comments

I'm not sure how long this has been there (a while now; I'm imporing this from an old blog of mine), but Google has added a filter on its Advanced Search page which allows you to filter search results by the license that content on a website is released under, which would be useful, for example, if you are looking for content which you can republish on your page.

Google: Search within a site

Published by Tiposaurus on April 2, 2011 in Google and Tips. 0 Comments

Google lets you narrow your search down to within a specific website, or to within a specific TLD (for example .gov).

You can do this by using the site: command in your search, for example:

  • java site:sun.com - searches for java on sites with the domain name sun.com (this includes subdomains, like java.sun.com)
  • java site:java.sun.com - more specific; searches for java on sites with the domain name java.sun.com.
  • copyright site:gov - searches all US government sites (domain names ending in .gov) for the term copyright.

How To: Use Google to define words

Published by Tiposaurus on April 1, 2011 in Google and Tips. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

You can use google to find definitions of words rather than looking them up in an online dictionary.
To do this, search for "define:" followed by the word (without quotes) you want to find the meaning of.
For example: "define:potato".

How To: Access a Page in Google's Cache

Published by Tiposaurus on April 1, 2010 in Google. 0 Comments

Normally the format of a URL in Google's cache is:

http://google.com/search?q=cache:xxxxx:yyyyy

Where xxxxx is a hash of the URL and yyyyy is the address itself.
You can access the cache of specific URL by omitting the hash part and simply using the url:

http://google.com/search?q=cache:xxxxx

For example:
http://google.com/search?q=cache:google.com

This is also possible without editing the url, by searching google for "cache:google.com"

To highlight terms within the cache'd page, add them on to the end of the search query, for example: "cache:google.com news" will highlight the word "News"