You’ve been using Google for years now, probably for over a decade. In those years, there are times when you’d have wondered why the results you were expecting did not pop up. Have you been doing your search rightly?

When it comes to Google search, there are smart tricks you can use to get the best results.

Here are a few of them:



1. Use quotes to search for an exact phrase

This is one of the most vital search tips, especially useful if you’re trying to find results containing a specific a phrase. If searching for a specific quote, use quotation marks (“”). Google will find out the results containing accurate set of words without any change in order. You can also use a plus sign (+) immediately before the word without any space, it will provide you the same result as from quotation marks.



2. Use the minus sign to narrow the search

e return something totally unexpected? Terms with multiple meanings can return a lot of unwanted results. To eliminate results with certain words that aren’t of interest to you, figure out what terms you’re not interested in (e.g. jaguar -car) and re-run the search.



3. Don’t use common words and phrases

Common terms like a and the are called stop words and are usually ignored. Punctuation is also typically ignored. But there are exceptions. Common words and punctuation marks should be used when searching for a specific phrase inside quotes. There are cases when common words like the are significant. For instance, Raven and The Raven return entirely different results.



4. Use unique specific term

It is simply amazing how many Web pages are returned when performing a search. You might guess that the terms hangout spots are relatively specialized. A Google search of those terms returned 827,000 results! On the other hand, the terms hangout spots in Lagos returned just 141,000. To reduce the number of pages returned, use unique terms that are specific to the subject you are researching.



5. Search specific websites

There are times when you want to see only search results from a website. To make this easier, think of the “site:” function as a Google search that searches only a particular website. If you want to see every time DailyDigest.ng mentioned on Google, use the search “Google site:DailyDigest.ng”. If you want to search information from a specific website then use the keyword with the name of your desired website and separate them with double colon. For example, [lifestyle: DailyDigest.ng].


Source : http://www.dailydigest.ng/5-tricks-for-making-smart-google-searches/