We’ve been using a bunch of “Google operands,” (fancy term for Google search shortcuts), that help us find what we’re looking for, when we Google, and we’d like to share 5 tips with you, to make your life a little easier:

Google has indexed a massive part of the internet. In 2008, it reportedly indexed its 1 trillionth unique URL! The insane part is that despite all of this indexing, many people estimate “Google coverage” to be only “in a few percent range”, of the total. In this day and age; the amount of online data is already so large and growing at such a fast rate, that it’s become literally impossible to measure.

This being the case, it is more crucial than ever that we learn the best way to find what we are looking for out there, in the galaxy of the World Wide Web; that single “needle in a haystack”, so to speak.

So SheBytes is here to help you out!  Here are out 5 Google Operands tips! 

1. If you’re trying to find out the time in Paris, France simplify things by typing “time in Paris”
2. The “~” (tilde), on your keyboard is undoubtedly underused. One great search trick is to enter a “~” directly prior to your search term with no space in between. This will allow Google to send you back different variations and close matches of your search term.
3. If you’re searching for a definition of the word “byte”, just enter “define: byte”. Your desired definition will be the first search result!
4. You can also become more specific by putting a “-“ (minus sign), directly prior to a search term you’d like to exclude. If you’re looking for the SheBytes post “Softphones: Pick Up! Your Computer’s Ringing” as opposed to the “What is VoIP” post, you already read, just enter “shebytes softphone –what is voip”.
5. A really nice trick is the ability to search a specific site for a specific search term, straight from Google. If you’re trying to search SheBytes for the word love, just enter “love site:www.shebytes.com” and the results will be specific to only that website!

We love to hear from our readers, so let us know if you have any handy Google shortcuts, below!