Raise your Google IQ in two easy keystrokes

Don't you just hate it when you search for something online and get a gazillion nonsense hits that have nothing whatsoever to do with what you were looking for?

It doesn't have to be that way.

As I mentioned before, I'm a hopeless information geek. I went to grad school in Information Science fer cryin out loud. Plus, I've spent a significant chunk of my career getting paid to do research. Let's just say I know a lot about hunting down information using that series of tubes that make up the internets.

Raise Your Google IQ with Two Simple Keystrokes:

1. [shift key]
2. [ " key]

A single quotation mark at the beginning of a phrase will ensure you only get hits for pages that contain that exact phrase. Otherwise, you'll end up with hits for any pages that happen to have those words -- even if there's twenty paragraphs of text in between them.

More Signal, Less Noise.

Search on the words practical and archivist and you get 480,000 hits. Put a single quote at the beginning and there's only 611 to sift through.

Why don't people do this every time they search?

Partly because no one ever told them about phrase searching. And partly because search engines are designed to guess what it is you're looking for, and they place their best guesses toward the top. For a phrase that's uncommon (like "practical archivist") it's not even necessary. For example, this blog shows up in the #1 spot whether you use quotes or not.

The next time you're faced with gazillions of nonsense hits, let Google know exactly what you're looking for. Two keystrokes is all it takes.
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Research Tip: Custom Search Engines

In my last entry, I promised to share some of my favorite research tips. Today I'm going to share a brand new tip I just learned the other day.

I've been a Google addict ever since I typed in "metropolitan museum of art" and clicked the "I feel lucky button" some time in either 1998 or 99. Was the result a list of links? Nope. Clicking that button took me directly to the Met's homepage. I was bedazzled.

But the geeky research fun just never stops with Google. One of the newest tricks to come out of Google Labs is custom search engines. I used this tool to create my Preservation Answer Machine. It takes the guesswork out of finding reliable preservation information online. You can create your very own if you are so inclined. Here's how.

But even if you don't want to create your own custom search engine, there's good news. Now you can search for other custom engines on any topic you can dream up. All you have to do is type your keyword plus this:

inurl:cse inurl:coop site:google.com

I put those Google commands on a separate line so you can just double click it, copy it, and paste it into Google. Easy peasy.

I tried this hack with the keyword "GENEALOGY" and got eight results:

GEDCOM Search
Genealogy Search Engine
Genealogy Blog Finder
Genealogy Search
Family Matters Search Engine
Genealogy Blog Finder
Thrall Local History & Genealogy Guide Search
UTGenWeb - counties

So go have fun with Google -- and if you find something remarkable please use the comments section to share it. If it's helpful to you, it's probably helpful to someone else, too.

I found this great Google Hack via Research Goddess Tara Calashain's not-to-be-missed Research Buzz.
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