Hack Google search with these 5 tips from Patrick Norton

By Patrick Norton Published January 22, 2016

I’m Patrick Norton from TekThing and I’m here on Digital Trends today to show you five awesome Google search hacks.

First up, if you need a specific name or specific term, put them all in quotes. That tells Google you’re want to be specific and want to search for those exact words. Use a hyphen or minus sign if you want to exclude certain terms – say, you want to search for dogs, but not yellow dogs? Enter this: dogs -yellow dogs.
But who doesn’t like yellow dogs?

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Say you want results from a specific domain; enter the search term, then type site, a colon, and the domain you want to search, like this: dogs site:digitaltrends.com.

And yes, you can actually stack your searches, combining terms you’re excluding, a specific phrase you’re hunting for, the exact domain you want, whatever. Just please, won’t someone think of the yellow dogs?

Want to know when a holiday falls in the next five years? Type the name of it and the year, and Google will tell you exactly what day you should plan your celebration around. The same search works for movie releases as well – go ahead, give a try. You can find out ahead of the game when Rocky 23 will be released.

If you want sites that have similar content to a website you know the name of, just type related-colon and the name of the site you like. You’ll get a whole list of sites with similar content.

Here’s a handy one: Google tip calculator and up will pop an app that lets you enter the amount of the bill, the tip you want to pay in a percentage, and even the number of people, should you and your buddies plan to split things up. Unfortunately, there’s no sign of an app that will tell you what people should tip based on exactly what they ate. But there is a decent scientific calculator built into Google as well. Just type the calculation you’re trying to work out into the search bar and let Google do the thinking for you.

Thanks for watching. I hope some of these Google search tips help you find what you’re looking for.

Former Contributor

Patrick cohosts TekThing, a video show packed with viewer questions, product reviews, and how-tos. He also works on This Week…

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