At first glance, Google Blog Search looks very familiar and, initially, it functions the same as the Google homepage: enter your search terms and press ’search’. However, when your results are returned, you may notice a few slight changes. First of all, notice that all the results have the time of publication and the author after the result title. This is derived from the blog post and you can easily narrow down your search by time using the options on the left side of the page.

Digging a little deeper by clicking on the ‘Advanced Blog Search’ link lets you further specify your search request. The first few options are familiar to Google uses and let you specify terms that must or must not be in the result. The next few options allow you to specify words in the title of the post and also which site the posts come from, while the last few options let you specify the author and time of posting. If you know any of this information, you can drastically cut down the number of search results that may be returned.

Finally, Google Blog Search also offers you the ability to subscribe to an RSS feed or email alert of the search results, so that you will be updated whenever a new post that matches your criteria is published (see more about subscribing to sites and searches here).

With blogs becoming an increasingly common source of information and news, having this ability to search through them is becoming more important, and I hope that this information helps you to find what you’re after. If you have any other tips on searching blogs, let me know in the comments!

Find results

These four boxes are a breakdown of the regular operators that you can use in a Google search: and, or, plus, minus and quotes. I covered these in an earlier post that you might like to review here.

The first box (with all of the words) contains all the words you wish to search for and is the equivalent of the search box on the main Google page.
The second box (with the exact phrase) lets you search for a certain phrase, such as “to be or not to be”, as a phrase rather than individual words. This is the same as if you had enclosed the phrase in quotation marks in a regular search.
The third box (with at least one of the words) works the same as putting a plus sign in front of a search term and ensures that only results that include that term are returned.
The last box in this section (without the words) is the opposite of the previous box and ensures that none of the results includes a certain term, which is the same as prefixing a regular search term with a minus sign. This is useful when searching for a term that can be easily confused, for example Prince -music.

Language

Specifies what language you would prefer the results returned to be in. Google can also attempt to automatically translate pages in other languages if these are returned in your search results. The translation may not be perfect, but it is often enough to be able to find the information you may need.

Region

This selection will limit your results according to the country of the site, which is identified by the two-letter identifier after the .com or .co in the sites address. Examples include .uk for the United Kingdom, .ca for Canada or .au for Australia. You can find a complete list here. However, not all sites have addresses that include their country, with many opting to use the general .com format. The .com format also seems to be the default for US sites, with .us domains being quite rare.

File Format

If you are looking for a file, rather than a webpage, you can specify that here. The most common use for this field is probably PDF files, but you can also specify Microsoft Office documents or other types. This is the equivalent of using the filetype: operator and can also be set to exclude certain filetypes from the results.

Date

Your search results can be limited to those pages published within a certain timeframe with this field. You can limit the results from the past year, right up to the past 24 hours. This means that you can keep track of the latest developments in a topic, or look for more historical information.

Numeric Range

This is a very versatile field that enables you to enter a range to include in your search. This may be useful, for example, if you are searching for a car and would like to specify a range of years between 1996 and 2000. This also works for other ranges, such as prices, times or distances, so you can refine your search in different ways. Specifying a range, such as 1996 to 2000, in these fields is the same as entering the range with two points between the values in a regular search, 1996..2000 in this case.

Occurrences

This field searches for your terms in certain parts of the document, namely the title, text or URL. It can also search for the given text in the links pointing to the page. This field is useful if you have a page in mind that you are trying to find and know some information about it, but can remember its location. These features can be emulated in a regular search by using the allintitle:, allintext:, allinurl: and allinanchor: operators, respectively.

Domain

Restrict your search to a specific site by specifying it in this field. In most cases you would enter the top level of the site, such as nytimes.com. This will only return results based on your keywords from the nytimes.com website. This is the same as using the site: operator in a regular search.

Usage Rights

This is an interesting field that allows you to filter your results based on the their copyright license. If you are searching for content that you are allowed to reuse or modify, this is perfect. It is based on Creative Commons licensing and, while users are encouraged to double-check the license to ensure they are acting correctly, is a great function for people looking for material to repurpose, stock materials or other free-to-use resources.

Safe Search

Adult material, such as pornography and other explicit content, can be filtered from your search results using this field. This setting is also available under the Preferences link from the main Google page, as are some of the language settings.

Similar

The last two options require you to enter a web address (URL). Specifying a web page’s URL in the ‘Similar’ section will return a list of suggested sites that Google believes are similar to the page. This is based on a variety of criteria and is the same as using the related: operator and entering the page’s address.

Links

Entering a web page’s URL into this field will return a list of other sites that link to that page. This is useful to gauge a page’s popularity, to track a discussion or find similar sites. Again, this functionality can be used directly from a regular Google search by using the operator link: and then entering the page’s URL.

Next…

And that’s everything. There are a few links at the end of the page that will take you to some content-specific versions of Google, such as Google Book Search and Google Scholar, but for day-to-day searching, you should be able to use the above fields to wade through the internet to get close to the information you are looking for. Once you are used to using the Advanced Search screen, you can then start to use the operators in your normal Google searches.

The most important advice when it comes to advanced searches is to experiment! Try different things and see how the search results vary. There’s a lot of information out there, all it needs is for you to be able to track it down.

One operator I have previously covered is ‘define:’, which will attempt to find a definition for the term that follows it, such as define:search. Other operators work in exactly the same way, but instead of defining a term, they can be used to further specify your search criteria.

Say you wanted to find all the pages on The Age website about kittens. Using the operator ’site:’, we can limit the search results to only those pages from theage.com.au. This is done by simply adding the operator and the site to the search criteria, giving us the search term: kitten site:theage.com.au

If you know any of the terms in the page’s title or URL, then you can use this to locate the page using the ‘inurl:’ and ‘intitle:’ operators. Building on our earlier search, we can restrict our list of The Age pages about kittens to only those pages with ‘cat’ in the title with the search term: kitten site:theage.com.au intitle:cat

If you already have a site’s address, there are also operators that will let you find out more information about that site. In this case, just enter the operator followed by the URL. These include ‘info:’, which will display information about the page and links to other operator searches on the page; ‘related:’, which shows a list of sites that Google believes are like the one specified; and ‘link:’, which shows which pages link to the specified URL.

However, perhaps one of the most useful operators is ‘cache:’. This will bring up a copy of the page that Google stored last time it indexed the site. This is extremely useful if a page suddenly becomes unavailable or is changed and you need to see a recent previous copy. As with all these operators, there should be no spaces between the operator, the colon and the term.

These operators allow for some really specific searches to be run and, if you know what you are looking for, can slash the amount of time spent wading through pages of results. It is worth experimenting with each one to see what kind of results you get and to become familiar with each so you can work them into your daily searching.

Equations and conversions are a good first example, just enter a simple sum, such as 10+5, into the search box and hit enter. Similarly, enter a plain text conversion question, like three cups in pints, and Google will calculate it instantly. The same works for currencies, try 10 US dollars in UK pounds.

This is great for maths-based questions, but the same also works for factual questions. Next time you have a question with a straight-forward factual answer, try putting it into Google and see if you get the answer right back. You could start with an easy one, such as the population of Australia, and quickly find out that it’s just over 20 million. Staying with countries, how about the GDP of Brazil? Simple, according to Google, via various other sources, it is around US$1.6 trillion. Moving away from countries now, we can find out that date of birth for Nelson Mandela is 18 July, 1918; that the height of Mt Everest is 29,000 feet; or that the stock price for GOOG is currently around 714.87. All this without leaving Google.

Now we can try business information. Try searching for Melbourne Central, Melbourne, Australia. You can see that Google has returned an address, map and phone numbers for the most likely results. For US searchers, there will be a lot more information that can be found by entering information that you already have. Give it a shot with other addresses or phone numbers. In addition to this kind of information, you can also get information on courier packages simply by entering their consignment number. Google will recognise the number and the company and let you know where your package is.

The last feature of Google that I’ll cover here is definitions. Just enter define: and then any word and Google will search a number of locations for definitions and return them for you. Give it a shot with define: dodecahedron. This is a quick and easy way to use Google as a dictionary and thesaurus, all from the single page and can be extremely useful for technical or less-common words you may come across.

In short, don’t be afraid of typing things into Google to see what comes back. Just ask a question and you could receive an answer with your very next click!