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Google

Google search engine is a powerful tool to help find content on the World Wide Web.  Simplicity is the key to making searches successful.  You can look for just about anything using a few key words. On the other hand if you use too many words in a search you may end up getting a lot of sites that are not relevant to what you are looking for.  It is also best to use words that you would expect to appear in the page you are looking for.  Using descriptive words also will help Google zone in better on what you are searching for.  Punctuation marks are generally ignored by Google except when they are used to help focus a search.  For example placing double quotes around a set of words tells Google to look for those words in the exact order.  You can also set the search to look in a particular website by typing the words you are looking for then add the location of the site.  For example, if looking for information about a local community issue you would type:  Prop 13 site:dailybreeze.com.  This will return information about the Proposition only from the Daily Breeze website.  One punctuation mark that can be tricky is the dash or hyphen (-).  A dash or hyphen used in your search before a word tells Google to leave out sites that contain that word.  So if you are looking for pro-choice websites, you should leave out the hyphen. When you are searching for something that you can remember only part of the name or description you can use an asterisk (*) in place of the word that you can’t remember.  If you know exactly what you are looking for and do not want Google looking for anything close use the plus + without any spaces before the word you are looking for and Google will look exactly for that word.  Using double quotes around the word will do the same thing. When looking for something that could have been called two different phrases or if you are looking for something that could be in multiple years you can use the word OR in capital letters between your alternates and Google will look for info on either of the words on either side of the OR.  Without an OR between the words, Google will look for content pages that include both of the words.  Google also has a number of search features that are used for specific interest.  Google can recognize a request for weather by location by typing weather then the location.  The same format works for the time and maps in any part of the world, Stock Prices by just typing in the ticker symbol, conversions for common measurements or currencies, such as centimeters to inches, liters to gallons.  When you type in the request with the amount Google will actually perform the calculation.  Sports scores can be looked up simply by typing the team’s name.  When looking for the synonym of a word you can type the tilde (~) before the word and lookup synonyms.  You also can track packages by some of the most common carriers by simply typing in the tracking number in the search box.  These are just some of the wonderful features built in to the Google search engine and more features are added regularly.