#13 5 Ways to search smarter online

1) Finding the URL of an image that you saved on your computer but forgot to write it down

 

Go to Google Images and click the camera icon that is directly next to the search button (magnifying glass).

 

Select ‘Upload an image’ and click ‘Upload’ once you have selected the image you saved.

 

The search result will come up with similar images.

 

 

NOTE: If you do not mind which website you cite as a reference, then select any of the URLs that show an image that is as close to the one you saved on your computer. Otherwise go through each search result and look for the URL of the website you know you got it from (if you forget the name of the website, you will most likely recognise the website URL when you come across it)
 

2) Finding content from 1 source only

If you wish to see articles about a certain topic from only one specific website, and excluding other websites from the search results, type ‘site:’ and then the URL, along with the topic you are searching for.

E.g. site:docs.google.com "Windows 7"

Note: Using ‘docs.google.com’ as a filter will allow you to view documents that you would normally not be able to view on Google Docs without the use of the filter.

3) Searching a topic (and excluding certain sub-topics at the same time)

Sometimes you will want to find content on a specific topic without wanting to read content about a sub-topic within that topic. For example, you want to find content about ‘inbound marketing’ and not show any search results that bring ‘advertising’ into the articles. To achieve this, type in the topic you want to find content about and then add ‘-‘ along with the certain sub-topic(s) you wish to exclude from your search results.

E.g. inbound marketing -advertising  

4) Searching for specific document types

You may think that the majority of least thought about ideas and concepts would be found on   scientific websites and the like, however not many students realise the least thought about ideas and concepts are raised in research papers written by scientists the world over. To be able to find research papers online (and the research papers as the only search result document type), type whatever topic you are searching for in Google and add ‘filetype:ppt’ after it to only see search results that are ‘PowerPoint Presentations’. Not all but most research papers are in the form of a PDF format, so use ‘pdf’ instead.

E.g. "inbound marketing" filetype:pdf 

 

5) Non-personalised search results

When you use any search engine, the results of your search are automatically displayed by how popular the site ranks against other sites, where the most popular result (because it might be the most helpful or any other reason) is displayed as the first search result and so on. However, if in an essay you want to bring up other ideas or concepts that no other student would think to bring up, this is the number one way to achieve that as 99.99% of students will be finding essay content from popular and high ranking sites (meaning everyone of those 99.99% will be talking about the same points as each other – you will be part of the 0.01% without somewhat ‘original’ points).

To do this, once the search results are shown click on ‘Search Tools’ shown beneath the search bar and click ‘Verbatim’.

- Aaron S