Earlier this week, I attended an event for content creators at Google New York. I must say that the offices were quite impressive… While I was walking through the various areas, I started getting flashbacks to the investment banking days at Salomon Smith Barney. I assumed that the office was so cool and the food was so delicious because the company expected its workers to practically live there. I was happy to learn that I was wrong. Great perks plus sane work hours? Call me Google…maybe? (I’m just joking. I love working from home!)
Anyway, I learned some helpful information about search, safety, Google plus and YouTube that I think you will appreciate. I am sharing the top 10 takeaways about Google Search below:
1. Google is constantly changing its algorithms so that Google Search can better understand what users need and pull up searches that give them what they want.
2. The keyword ads (on the top and side of the page) are based on your specific searches and your search history.
3. Google Inside Search is a great site to learn how search works, because it details what is going on behind the scenes.
4. If you type the name of a movie, “weather” or “time” in the Google search bar, it will pull up your local information. You might have already known that, but I didn’t!
5. There are several different search tools that allow you to refine your search (i.e. time frame).
6. Knowledge Graph is also another great way to explore different aspects of the topic that you are searching.
7. You can also use modifiers to better help you with your search. Google’s search operators page gives some prime examples (i.e. excluding words from your search and searching within a specific site or domain).
8. You can also search for public data in Google web search. For instance, if you want to examine census and other public data over a period of time, you can easily get that information and place it in an embeddable Google chart.
9. Google Image searches are also helpful. They can easily be refined (by size, color, type and more).
10. Now, if you feel like these tips have helped you become a search master, you might want to try out A Google a Day on Google+. It’s a fun trivia game that actually encourages the use of Google search to find the answers:
If you have any other questions about Google Search, please let me know so that I can get your questions answered.