Tips on Sharpening Your Google Search

Google, since its creation, has been an asset to web users worldwide. It presented compact, precise searches on exactly what the user was looking for, with each page being at least somewhat relevant, and informational.

Now, Google, being loaded with, and spidering, thousands of 'fluff' webpages every day, may have had to make sacrifices in the quality of their searches.
You might search for 'queso' and get back, say, an item list for an online game in which 'queso' is a health-restoring device--or something--when, actually, you were just looking for cheese.

With search-narrowing functions that are really very little-known, you can master Google and make it bend to your will!

One can include special characters and operators such as +, -, ~, .., OR, and quotation marks to enhance the effectiveness and precision of their Google search.

By putting something in quotation marks ( "this is a demonstration" ), you are asking Google to search for that exact phrase.

By putting something with a + sign ( + doggies ), you are telling Google to search for everything else before the +, but especially the "doggies". Just an example. You could use this to force Google to include a 'stop word', such as "or", "and", and other words that Google likes to omit from searches to make them supposedly more relevant.

By using the - sign ( - doggies), you are telling Google to search for everything else before the -, but to only return pages that contain that, but do not contain "doggies". There are all sorts of wonderful applications for this.

The tilde sign (~), aka that little thing above some n's in Spanish, can be used in Google queries to tell Google that it is allowed to search for synonyms of the word directly following the tilde.
( ~doggies ). The search ( ~doggies ) might return results containing "doggies" or "puppies" or "pups", since Google might recognize these words as being synonymous.

To use the "OR" operator, which is usually omitted by Google searches, you can use a "|" in between words you want to "OR" with.

( doggies | kitties ) would return both results with doggies and results with kitties.

In order to search for things within a range, one can use "..". (3000..34000 doggies) would return results with pages involving any number of doggies from 3000 to 34000. Note that it is two dots, not three.

While you could do the same thing with an Advanced Search, sometimes it's too inconvenient to use an Advanced Search. Also, an Advanced Search won't let you combine functions in the same way that dressing up your query manually will.

Good luck, fellow Google users!