-Searching- finding like a real pro

Everybody uses search engines, but a big amount of users doesn't know that the search engines have a lot of powerful functionalities for searching, and it's no surprise! usually these functionalities are only known by tech savvy people. I will guide you through tricks that are explained using google, but most functionalities are present in all the search engines, and trust me :P if you don't know them, you're missing like 90% of the power of search engines, so even if you think you're an expert, keep reading! you might find something useful or that you don't know. I'll also include complicated search scenarios and a way to overcome them, because I believe that finding information for some topics can be complicated using the conventional ways.

Let's start with some facts and considerations about searching:

• Google doesn't care about punctuation, so stop using "," and ".".
• Keywords are not case sensitive. This means that apple = aPple for google.
• The search results are affected by your location. This means that if you want to search for something in a place you're going to be on vacation, you  will want to change the location. To do this, on the search results, you can clic on Search tools and then change your location there:
• The order of the words establish it's importance, so chose it carefully! This also means that the first results are more related to the first word the next results with the first and second word and so on. A good way to find lyrics in google is to set the word lyrics at the beginning and then the phrase or the name of the song. For example, searching for: lyrics "song of myself" will search first results containing lyrics, and then within those results, google will look for "song of myself".
• Be specific (we will talk about scenarios were this is not the best approach).
• Google will notify you at the top of the results, when words are being ignored.

And now let's check this search tools and recommendations:

• Phrases. This is my favourite functionality, you can enclose words with: " to search for phrases, for example, when searching for a song that you don't remember the name, but you do remember the lyrics, you can search for something like: "and salt betrays my eyes again" lyrics.
• Images. This is also an awesome tool! If you find a picture, and you would like to know more about it (for example, the place were it has been taken) you can save the picture on your desktop and then go to the search images in google, and then click here:                                                                                       
• That will open a window and you can select the image you want to search. It will show results matching the same picture, and similar images.
• Searching in a particular web site. Sometimes you know that the information you're looking for is in a web site, but you just don't remember were. For this cases, if you include: site:www.website.com plus the words you're searching for, google will look for results that are only in the web site specified. For example, searching for site:www.rainforest.org trees, will look for the word trees in the web site: www.rainforest.org.
• Word definitions. If you want to know the definition of a word you can search for define:word. And google will look for a definition (like a dictionary).
• Or. The word OR helps you search for one term or another. For example, if you want to search for results that contains chocolate or pie, but not both! you can do it by searching for: chocolate OR pie.
• Wildcard. The "*" character is like the joker card for google. When you use it, google will  match it with any word. This can be very useful, used in combination with phrase searching. For example, when you're searching for the lyrics of a song and you don't remember a complete phrase, This is the result of searching for: lyrics "ever * away with me"             
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• Results of introducing a phone number. Sometimes, when you just have the phone number of a person, you can search for it using google. In order for this to  work properly, you will want to make sure that the results are searched in the location were the phone belongs. 

Now it's time for the cherry of the cake ;) I will give you advise for searching under complicated circumstances, you'll be surprised by it, give it a try when your conventional ways of searching are not producing the expected results:

• Different pages were your info can be. Suppose that you installed a new version of an operating system and you want to update your drivers to make them work properly. Where are you going to search? usually you'll search for the driver's page and then you'll download the drivers there. But... what will you do if the page is down! are you going to wait until it is up again? For this particular case, you know that most parts of your machine are of another brand different from your computer's brand. So, for example, if your gpu driver is Nvidia, you can go and search for it in the Nvidia's page! or maybe in a page of another brand that also uses the same Nvidia gpu that you've.
• Searching for a very specific topic. Were did you search when you want to buy something? did you use google? Of course no! you go to some online store and then you search for the item there. The same logic applies to some very specific or complicated topics, for example, when you search for a math problem that is uncommon, it's better search in sites like: http://math.stackexchange.com/.or to make questions there, usually you'll receive a response in less than a day. There are many communities online that are focused on particular topics, usually they've a very good and structured web site with lots of information and search resources. Another thing that you can do, is to search for something more generic, and then take a look at the results, and came with another more particular words to find what you're looking for.
• Searching for something difficult to describe or for something that you don't know much about. In this case you can also try to search for something more generic, for example, if you saw a recipe for a cake with a very specific name, but you just don't remember the name, you could try searching for cake's recipes, and then get some more context to do a better search (for example, the ingredients, the country's recipe, etc). 
• About online systems. Are you using online systems (CRM,  RP, school web sites, etc) ? if your answer is yes, remember that you can take a look at the communities of the online system for answers, they'll probably came across the same issue that you need to address.
• Searching for images. Searching for images can be though, sometimes google image search is not good enough, so if you want to search for a set of images, that are related to some topic, you'll find a lot of resources in tumblr or flickr. Particularly in tumblr, you can find lots of accounts that are related to some topic, for example: http://strictly-mma.tumblr.com/ is a tumblr page were you can find lots of mma related images.

Ok, this post is comming to an end :) My final advise is to use common sense and create your own search heuristic based on your situation. 

I want to thank you for reading, and if you enjoy, please share! If you want me to talk about some software related topic, please let me know in the comments!