Hundreds of millions of people around the world use Google to search the internet. What is surprising is that of these millions of people only a few know the options to do more targeted searches and find the information they need faster, without getting lost among the dozens of results provided.
Writing a quick query can't be simpler, but if you want to refine your search results, there are a few options and tricks that are always worth keeping in mind.
Some of them may be known and basic while others may represent important news and radically change the way people search on the internet.
It is therefore worth giving a quick read to the guide to the preferences and options that can be used when searching with Google from a PC .
1) First of all, it is important to know that if Google is set as the browser's default search engine, you can search by writing directly on the address bar of Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explore, without having to open the Google.it or Google site. com.
Also, if you use Chrome as a browser, the new tab page contains the search box with the Google logo as the Google.com homepage.
2) Google responds directly to some specific searches thus avoiding the user having to click another site.
There are several of these direct searches and we can list the most important ones here:
- Weather : to know the weather forecast in a city, just write, for example, Rome Weather .
- Exact time in a city : just write Los Angeles Time to know the time right now in Los Angeles without making time zone calculations.
- Currency converter and unit of measure : just write 1 dollar in Euro to know how much a US dollar is worth in Euro and in the same way you can do all the unit conversions you want.
- Traffic : looking for Rome Traffic you get immediately the map of Rome and the indication of the traffic on the roads.
By pressing on the map, you enter Google Maps to see the details of each street.
- Sports results : just search for the name of a football team or other sports to see its latest results.
- Air flights : looking for Flights Rome, after the advertisement you will see the direct connections for that city and you can go into the details of the flight search.
- Movies : to find out the time and schedule of Rome's cinemas, just search on Google Film Rome
- Other demographic and geographic information such as the filmography of the actors, the career of the players, the height of the mountains, population of the cities.
- Graphs and mathematical operations : you can get graphs for trigonometry functions from Google (try, for example, to search for sin (y)) and make calculations and operations such as 1 + 1, using a complete scientific calculator that appears instead of Search Results.
- Vocabulary definitions by looking for example in computer definition
- Translations, looking for translate dog in Italian, you get the translation box directly
3) As seen in another article, if you have an Android smartphone you can search where the phone is directly on Google from PC
4) Searching by voice on Google on PC is possible using a microphone and Google Chrome as a browser on PC.
5) If you search on Google while remaining connected with your Google or Gmail account, pressing the Login button at the top right, you have several advantages for doing research in a personalized way and also some things to know about the history that is stored online.
Once logged in to Google, you can press the preferences button at the top right to decide whether to include private results (i.e. personalized according to the preferences of past searches), to see the Google history, download it and, if you want more privacy, prevent it from being stored.
Also in preferences you can activate the Google Instant Forecast function, to see the results change as you type the query.
The gear button at the top right also allows you to activate SafeSearch secure search, to be used if the computer is used by minors.
Private results can be hidden by clicking on the world icon at the top right, near the little man icon.
If you log in with your account you will see, in the upper right corner, the bell icon showing the account notifications (before it was only for Google+ while now it works in general also with notifications of different services).
By pressing the notifications icon, you will notice a settings button on the left side of the column where you can manage the services that send warnings (at the moment they are only Google Photos and Google+).
6) Google searches are always localized and personalized .
If you use Google in Italy, both using Google.it and Google.com you will still get Italian results.
You can change the language in the settings by pressing the gear button at the top right.
In another article, we saw how to use Google to do clean, non-personalized searches, like using the PC the first time.
For the same purpose you can always use the incognito mode of the browser.
To use Google.com USA the address //google.com/ncr or //www.google.com.pg/ (version of Papua New Guinea, identical to the USA version) should work.
7) Google has recently tried to make it easier for users to keep their account secure and also to adjust their privacy settings in searches .
We talked about this in two different articles related to:
- Google Account security check
- Google account privacy control, searches and personal data
- All personal Google Account settings on one page
8) The Google advanced search page allows you to set very specific filters for searches by filling out a form of very self-explanatory options.
Some of the most important filters also appear by pressing the Search Tools button on each results page.
In addition to the filters you can also use the good old Google search operators
9) Google Alert lets you know when a certain topic is mentioned on Google, that is when a new search result appears linked to a word chosen by us.
The Alert service lets you know when he talks about us or any other topic
In other articles we have written other articles about it:
- Google search tricks to refine results and get immediate answers
- 10 ways to search Google and find precise results
Finally, the complete guide to Google search on PC and also on mobile is on this official page.
