FIND ANYTHING ON THE INTERNET
Learning to navigate the World Wide Web effectively is an important skill, and there are lots of different ways for you to find the information you are looking for. Whilst the following list of tips and websites is by no means exhaustive – and we’ve missed out on some massive topics except travel, which deserve a post in their own right – they should be enough to get you started.
Using Google Operator Hacks
One of the things I love about Google is its clean layout – just type your query and hit enter. As well as the advanced search function, there are a load of operator hacks you can use to refine your search results. Check out the excellent Google Guide for a full list.
Here is a selection of some useful ones:
- salsa -dance will find pages containing “salsa” but not “dance”
- castle ~glossary will find pages containing glossaries and terminology related to “castle”
- define:matador will bring up definitions of the word “matador”
- ~crocodile will search for the word “crocodile” and similar words
- lon sfo to book flights from London to San Francisco
- delta flight 5778 to check the status of this flight
- what time is it in New York to find out the time in this city
- love site:www.matadornetwork.com/life to search only Matador Life for the word “love”
- love -site:www.matadornetwork.com/life to exclude Matador Life results from your search for “love”
And don’t forget if you want to visit a site that is down, or that your company’s server won’t let you access, you can view the Cached version to see a Google snapshot of that page from when it was last crawled.
Photo by author.
Finally, if you’re fed up with all the annoying affiliate links clogging up the Google search results, check out Give Me Back My Google.