1. Find the Face Behind the
Result – This is a neat trick you can use on a
Google Image search to filter the search results so that
they include only images of people. How is this
useful? Well, it could come in handy if you are
looking for images of the prominent people behind popular
products, companies, or geographic locations. You can
perform this search by appending the code &imgtype=face to the end of
the URL address after you perform a standard Google Image
search.
- Examples (notice
the differences in each URL):
2. Google + Social Media Sites =
Quality Free Stuff – If you are on the hunt for
free desktop wallpaper, stock images, Wordpress templates
or the like, using Google to search your favorite social
media sites is your best bet. The word “free” in any
standard search query immediately attracts spam. Why
wade through potential spam in standard search results when
numerous social media sites have an active community of
users who have already ranked and reviewed the specific
free items that interest you. All you have to do is
direct Google to search through each of these individual
social media sites, and bingo… you find quality content
ranked by hundreds of other people.
3. Find Free Anonymous Web Proxies – A
free anonymous web proxy site allows any web browser to access
other third-party websites by channeling the browser’s connection
through the proxy. The web proxy basically acts as a
middleman between your web browser and the third-party website you
are visiting. Why would you want to do this? There are
two common reasons:
- You’re connecting to a public network at a coffee shop or
internet café and you want privacy while you browse the web.
You don’t want the admin to know every site you visit.
- You want to bypass a web content filter or perhaps a
server-side ban on your IP address. Content filtering is
common practice on college campus networks. This trick will
usually bypass those restrictions.
There are subscription services and applications available such
as TOR and paid VPN servers that do the same thing. However,
this trick is free and easy to access from anywhere via
Google. All you have to do is look through the search results
returned by the queries below, find a proxy that works, and
enter in the URL of the site you want to browse
anonymously.
4. Google for Music, Videos, and Ebooks -
Google can be used to conduct a search for almost any file type,
including Mp3s, PDFs, and videos. Open web directories are
one of the easiest places to quickly find an endless quantity of
freely downloadable files. This is an oldie, but it’s a
goodie! Why thousands of webmasters incessantly fail to
secure their web severs will continue to boggle our minds.
5. Browse Open Webcams Worldwide – Take a
randomized streaming video tour of the world by searching Google
for live open access video webcams. This may not be the most
productive Google trick ever, but it sure is fun! (Note: you
may be prompted to install an ActiveX control or the Java runtime
environment which allows your browser to view certain video stream
formats.)
6. Judge a Site by its Image – Find out
what a site is all about by looking at a random selection of the
images hosted on its web pages. Even if you are somewhat
familiar with the target site’s content, this can be an
entertaining little exercise. You will almost surely find
something you didn’t expect to see. All you have to do is use
Google’s site: operator to target a domain
in an image search.
7. Results Based on Third-Party Opinion -
Sometimes you can get a better idea of the content located within a
website by reading how other websites refer to that site’s
content. The allinanchor: Google search
operator can save you large quantities of time when a normal
textual based search query fails to fetch the information you
desire. It conducts a search based on keywords used strictly
in the anchor text, or linking text, of third party sites that link
to the web pages returned by the search query. In other
words, this operator filters your search results in a way such that
Google ignores the title and content of the returned web pages, but
instead bases the search relevance on the keywords that other sites
use to reference the results. It can add a whole new
dimension of variety to your search results.
Bonus Material:
Here is a list
of my favorite Google advanced search operators, operator
combinations, and related uses:
- link:URL = lists other pages that link to the
URL.
- related:URL = lists other pages that are
related to the URL.
- site:domain.com “search term = restricts
search results to the given domain.
- allinurl:WORDS = shows only pages with all
search terms in the url.
- inurl:WORD = like allinurl: but filters the
URL based on the first term only.
- allintitle:WORD = shows only results with
terms in title.
- intitle:WORD = similar to allintitle, but only
for the next word.
- cache:URL = will show the Google cached
version of the URL.
- info:URL = will show a page containing links
to related searches, backlinks, and pages containing the url. This
is the same as typing the url into the search box.
- filetype:SOMEFILETYPE = will restrict searches
to that filetype
- -filetype:SOMEFILETYPE = will remove that file
type from the search.
- site:www.somesite.net “+www.somesite.net” =
shows you how many pages of your site are indexed by google
- allintext: = searches only within text of
pages, but not in the links or page title
- allinlinks: = searches only within links, not
text or title
- WordA OR WordB = search for either the
word A or B
- “Word” OR “Phrase” = search exact word or
phrase
- WordA -WordB = find word A but filter
results that include word B
- WordA +WordB = results much contain both Word
A and Word B
- ~WORD = looks up the word and its
synonyms
-
~WORD -WORD = looks up only the
synonyms to the word