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Using Google’s Advanced Search
Many of us know a computer nerd. You know, the person that always knows how to solve a technological problem when we have one. Those computer nerds know how to use the advanced features of many search engines by typing in strange characters into the search box such as quotes, a “+” sign, and many other symbols. Although it may seem that search engines have a steep learning curve, they are fairly easy to use when you get the hang of it.
Fortunately, there is a simple way to cheat! You can use a lot of the advanced features of Google’s or Yahoo’s search engine by clicking on one of the links below. Don’t worry, they will open up in a new window.
Google’s Advanced Search Page or, you can try Yahoo’s Advanced Search Page
Below, you can see a picture of Google’s Advanced Search Page:
This page presents an easy-to-use search box with many options. Don’t worry, we’ll tell you what everything means!
Let’s suppose you want to make a fruit salad recipe for your mother-in-law who is allergic to strawberries.
In order to find a suitable recipe, you would want to type fruit salad recipe in the second box down that says “this exact wording or phrase.” If you were to type it in the first box, Google could return recipes that are salads that contain fruit, such as a chicken apple raspberry vinaigrette salad. Next, be sure to type in strawberry in the “But don’t show pages that have any of these unwanted words.” This way, Google will omit recipes that contain strawberries. However, if you want your mother-in-law to suffer an allergic reaction, then you can leave the box blank 
.
Let’s say you’re in the mood for a fruit salad that at least has peaches or pears in it. You can type both of those in two of the boxes on the third line down (the one that says “one or more of these words.”
Now we’re down to the last section, “Need More Tools?”
If you hate how Google only gives you ten search results per page, you can choose to have up to 100 displayed in the “Results per page” drop-down box. Also, if you want to avoid the blog of a Frenchman who is blogging about a fantastic “Fruit Salad”, then you may want to select “English” from the language drop-down box.
If you would like to find a PDF file of a fruit salad recipe so that you can easily print it and save it to your computer, you could select “Adobe Acrobat PDF” from the “File type” drop-down box.
You’re almost done! If you have a specific site you want to search in, you can type that in the “Search within a site or domain” box. Now, all you have to do is click on the “Advanced Search” button!
Well, I was able to find a nice fruit salad recipe in PDF format that was free of strawberries and contained peaches! This is the one I found. It’s kind of fun to see Google only return 10 search results, rather than the “about 334,000″ recipes it returns when you just type in “fruit salad recipe.”
When you know how to search, you can easily find what you’re looking for! Good luck performing easy, advanced searches!
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2 Responses to “Using Google’s Advanced Search”
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Can I use advanced search to find mp3 files? I don’t see the option. Is there any easier way, to find mp3′s?
Hi Bony Delicious. Yes, there is an easier way to find MP3 files with Google. You can just copy and paste the following syntax into any Google search box: “name of mp3 here” intitle:index.of mp3 -html -htm -php -asp -txt -pls
Be sure to only search for MP3 files whose copyright owners have given express permission to be shared online, or you may get into some legal trouble.