Subscribe Via Email
How to Use Google Yellowpages to Find Any Local Business
Last month, I wrote about using Google as Your Whitepages phonebook. Today, I am going to describe how you can use Google as your Yellowpages as well.
Although Google seems to be an abstract company, they know about businesses that are just around the corner to where you live! All you have to do is think of a business category and then type in your location. You can use just a zip code, or a city and state.
For example, when my wife and I moved to Pittsburgh, we wanted to find out about the local pizzerias. All I had to do was type pizza, 15216 into a Google search box. Here’s what I got:
As you can see, Google shows me a map of my local area and then shows me where each pizzeria is located. This is nice, as I can quickly see which ones are closest to where I live. Google also lists the website and phone number of each establishment.
At the bottom of this page is a link that says More results near Pennsylvania 15216 >> If I click on this, I am taken to a more in-depth page of my results.
Here is what that in-depth page looks like:
This page gives you more information about some of the pizzerias. You will notice that Google now offers to give you driving directions to any one of these pizza kitchens.
You’ll also notice that for some of the businesses, Google displays reviews that other internet users have written. For example, on the last business a reviewer says she “saw a lady drop a tomatoe on the floor and pick it up and put it in someones salad.” I’ll be sure to avoid that place — especially if a tomatoe is a cross between a toe and a tomato. That doesn’t sound good at all.
At the very top of this page, you’ll find that Google has opened up a little Find businesses tab for you that you can use to find most any business. If you would like to access a Google Find businesses page for yourself without going through a standard Google search box, click here.
To show the power of the Google Yellowpages, let’s try searching for a medical profession in a remote area of the USA. We’ll try dentists in Provo, Utah. Here’s what we get:
This page looks similar to the previous one. I performed one more search just to demonstrate the power and versatility of Google’s Yellowpages.
You may notice that once you get through a few pages of results that they aren’t really relevant to what you searched for. This seems to happen on all searches. After all, you’ll notice that Google found 1,843 dentists in Provo…
Go ahead and try searching in your own city!
How to Use Google to Perform a Wildcard Search Using the Asterisk *
Using an asterisk (the * symbol) in your searches can add quite a bit of power to what you are able to find. Not many people are aware of this, but the asterisk can substitute for any word, or a number of words in your Google search. To see how this can be useful, check out some of the examples below.
Using the Wildcard to Find the Length of a Marathon
Let’s say that you want to find out how long a marathon is. All you have to do is type “a marathon is * miles long” into Google, and it will match phrases that contain that phrase with a something between is and miles, which should be our answer.
Since we were pretty specific, you can see that we only got 280 results, but the first four results seem to indicate unanimously that a marathon is 26.2 miles long.
It is remarkably easy to use Google to find out answers to questions without even going past the results page. As you can see, Google found our answer and displayed it for us on the results page.
Using the Wildcard to Find the Weight of a Macbook Air
Let’s say you’ve gotten tired of lugging around your six pound laptop. If you are curious as to how much the new Macbook Air weighs, all you have to do is type “macbook air weighs * pounds” into Google and you’ll get your answer.
As you can see, the general consensus among all three pages is that the Macbook Air weighs exactly 3.0 pounds.
It is always a good practice when doing searches like the above two to make sure that all of the pages agree. Keep in mind that this is the internet, and anybody can post whatever they want — fact or fiction.
Using the Wildcard to Find Thomas Edison’s Inventions
If you want to easily find out some of the amazing things that Thomas Edison invented in his lifetime, all you have to do is type thomas edision invented the *, and Google will return pages telling you what Thomas Edison was responsible for inventing.
As you can see, we find out from the first five results that Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, the incadescent lightbulb, the Quadraplex telegraph, and that he had a hand in inventing the modern alkaline battery.
Using the Wildcard to Find Celebrities’ Middle Names
The wildcard character can also be used to find many celebrities’ middle names. Let’s say you’re wondering what Barack Obama’s middle name is. It is normally not mentioned in public — not even an initial. All you have to do is type in barack * obama.
This tells Google to find Barack Obama, but to find something between those two names. In this case, the only logical thing that would come between his first and last name, would be his middle name.
From the first four search results, it is evident that Barack Obama’s middle name is Hussein.
In contrast, when you just perform a Google search for Barack Obama, no mention of the middle name Hussein is made, not even in his website’s Meet the Candidate section:
Using the Wildcard to Find Song Lyrics
Everytime I listen to the song Superman by Five For Fighting, I can never quite understand what he is saying near the end. It sounds like he says: I’m only a man with some moldy red cheese lookin’ for kryptonite.
That never quite made sense to me, and I was sure that I had the lyrics wrong. Fortunately, I decided to figure out what the real lyrics are. I did that using Google by typing in I’m only a man * kryptonite. I typed in only the lyrics that I was sure of. I knew that he sang I’m only a man, and that he ended with the word kryptonite, so that’s what I tried.
Without even going to another web page, I can plainly see what he sings in search results 2-4. What he really sings is I’m only a man in a silly red sheet Digging for kryptonite… Now I can unabashedly sing along in front of my friends!
Using the Wildcard to Find People’s Preferences
Let’s say you want to know a little more about internet users’ favorite colors. You can try typing in “my favorite color is *”. As you can see, I get a mix of results.
If you’re really bored, you could go through and count the number of times a color is mentioned to formulate some statistics on the favorite color of cyberspace… or not.
Conclusion
As you can see, the wildcard operator really has too many uses to mention here. Its uses are only limited by your imagination.
If you can think of more useful or clever ways to use the wildcard, please post them below in the comments section.
How to Use Google to Find MP3s
A while back, I discussed finding different file types with Google. That post never touched on how to find MP3 files with Google, since it isn’t a file type that Google officially supports.
A few weeks ago a reader wrote the following comment:
Can I use advanced search to find mp3 files? I don’t see the option. Is there any easier way, to find mp3’s?
After some research, I believe that I have found the syntax that most reliably finds MP3 files using Google.
How to Find MP3s Using Google
First of all, if you don’t care about the long syntax, and just want to find MP3 files, head on over to Simple Search: MP3 Finder, which is also accessible from the main menu under “Simple Search.”
Here is what you need to type in the Google Search box:
[name of artist/band and/or song] intitle:”index of” “parent directory” “last modified” “size” “description” [snd] (mp3|aac|wma) -inurl:(htm|html|lyrics|aspx|jsp|index|shtml|php|mp3s|mp3|cf) -gallery -intitle:”last modified”
It’s long and complicated, but it does the best at finding the files that you’re after.
The Breakdown of What It All Does
- intitle:”index of” - This tells Google to find the phrase “index of” in the web page’s title. Since the best way to find MP3 files is to just search for pages that simply list files in a directory, “index of” works because all directory listings contain that phrase in their title.
- “parent directory” “last modified” “size” “description” - This part makes sure that the page contains these words/phrases exactly as written. This makes sure that we are getting a directory listing. You can see a sample one in the screen capture below.
- [snd] - This is the alternate text that displays when there is a sound icon on the webpage, which there should be when we are dealing with a directory listing of audio files. In the screen capture above, you will notice a little image icon next to the image file. Below, I have outlined the SND icon in a sample directory of audio files:
- (mp3|aac|wma) - This tells Google to search for the words mp3, aac OR wma. As an alternative, I could have written mp3 OR aac OR wma, but this is more compact and easy to understand when dealing with such a large search syntax.
- -inurl:(htm|html|lyrics|aspx|jsp|index|shtml|php|mp3s|mp3|cf) -gallery -intitle:”last modified” - This last section is necessary because many webpages have caught on to how certain users search for MP3s on Google and have created fake pages that imitate directory listings. This string hopefully eliminates them by weeding out URLs that contain different buzz words.
If you have any questions about finding MP3 files with Google, just post them below!
Poll: Favorite Search Engine
Loading ...