Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Beginner’s Guide to Google Search Basics and Tips and Tricks”.
This video is the beginner’s guide to using Google search. Now I know what you’re thinking you’re thinking. I already know how to use Google search. You just go to google.com, you type in what you’re looking for you hit enter and it brings up results and for the most part, that’s true, that’s what you need to do, but there are some interesting hidden tools and tips and tricks that it’s helpful to know. So, let’s look at a few of those first off.
We have voice search if you’re, using Google Chrome as your browser. You can just go over here to the right and instead of typing in the word flowers, you can click, and once you allow your microphone flowers, you can just. You can just speak what you want into your computer. If you have a microphone great speak it into the microphone, but it will interpret what you said and do the search.
So that’s a nice little feature a little trick. Some people will use that more than others, but it is good to know about another thing. You should be aware of is after you do a search if you’ve just done a basic Google search. You will get a list of websites here at the left. That’S basically what Google is giving. You is websites each of these, that you click should take you to another website in this case about trees. Over here on the right, I get a sampling of some of the other Google tools. Okay, so I’m getting a few images here at the right. I get a definition that they pulled from Wikipedia and some other information is provided there too, but for the most part I’m just getting websites listed here at the bottom. You can see that there’s more than one page.
It looks like there’s ten pages worth of results, but if you’ve used Google much at all, you know that there’s more than ten. If I click on ten, it gives me an additional few and you can see up here at the top seven hundred and five million results so plenty of websites to read to look at and to learn from. So, let’s look at some ways that we can maybe digest these results a little bit better. Seven hundred and five million results. Just is not that useful to me that helpful. It’S it’s too much so over here at the right.
You can see that there are search tools and you can click on that and you can go to where it says anytime, and you could change this to be something other than time what about the last hour. So in the last hour, what do we have related to trees? You can see that there’s some news there’s some websites that have been recently updated. Instead of seven hundred and five million results, we have apparently fewer it’s kind of hard to tell. I don’t see a total, but apparently we have fewer results and it’s focused on recent results. So that’s powerful. You can also do the past 24 hours the past week month year and you can also put in a custom range. So maybe you’ve heard about a report. A new report – some new research, maybe has been done and you would like to learn about it and, let’s say it’s regarding trees and trees dying. Okay, so you could do that search, trees dying and you could say in the past 24 hours or the past month, and it would give you recent results, hopefully, including that research that you’ve heard about that’s new.
So this is a very powerful tool and a very important tool. I’M gon na do that, search again the tree dying search. I know not a very positive topic to choose, but there we have it now.
Another thing I could do to try to cut down on the number of results is: I could use some of the search tricks and tips that have been around for years. Many of you know this already, but if you put some terms in quotes, it should cut down on the number of results, so I had 60 million results before doing this now I have 38 thousand, so from 60 million down to 38 thousand. That’S a big improvement. It’S gon na help me focus in on what I’m looking for now.
You may also know that you can put in some things like you could put in a artificial okay, we’re gon na take out artificial trees that are dying by putting in the I’ve had mixed results with this. Sometimes it doesn’t take out that term at all, and I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong or what it is. But anyway, that’s what is supposed to do. It’S supposed to take results that have the word artificial completely out and it looks like it did reduce the number of results a little bit, which is kind of surprising to me.
You can also do a plus, so this is gon na force. The search to include a term along with tree dying, so tree dying, plus the word SAP and it looks like I got down to 338 results, so that seems to have really worked. It’S requiring the results to have both that word and this exact phrase. These are boolean type searches that I’m doing.
Okay and those are pretty helpful, there’s more that you can learn about boolean searches, but those are the basics. I think that you need to get started, so I’m gon na go back to my results to show a couple of other nice things that you can do inside of search tools. This is where we found any time, and but next to that, you also get all results. When you go to all results, it gives you the option of switching from all results to verbatim, and what is this talking about? Well, what it is is when Google does a search.
Typically, it doesn’t just search exactly what you type in it suggests alternatives. Maybe you misspelled a word, maybe you misspelled a phrase or a person’s name or maybe a website that you really would like to find and read misspelled the name or the term. So what Google does, if you have it, set to all results, which is the default? What Google does is it broadens the search instead of searching just for tree dying and artificial? It puts in all sorts of variations of these words, maybe some synonyms and things like that, and it gives you more results than it otherwise would now with verbatim switched on. What’S gon na happen is Google is going to look strictly for these exact words, these exact terms? It’S not gon na look for alternate spellings or try to correct mistakes that thinks I might have made.
I’M gon na click clear to just get back to the defaults. So those are some powerful search tools that are built right in to the Google search, but often you don’t see them until you’ve done the search so go ahead and do the search first then look for this search tools. Button before we move on. I want to show you a little trick that very few people notice or know about, and that is let’s say in your search results – you find a wonderful website that you’re like okay.
This is exactly what I was looking for, I’m so glad I found this. What you could do is you could put your mouse right here to the right of the URL. This is the URL or address of the website just to the right. There’S an arrow. If you click on that arrow, you could choose. Cached it’ll give you some versions of this site that are saved they’re kind of cached, but what I’m interested in is this one? The word similar so click on similar, and this will give me results that are very similar to the one that I enjoy and that I really am happy. I found so what a cool thing to generate more results that are similar to that specific one that you like all right. Let’S move on up here at the top left you can see. I have all selected, and this is usually the default when you do a Google search. It says all, but really what it’s showing you is all websites, it’s showing you a list of websites like I said, sometimes you’ll get some results here at the right. Some pictures and things like that, but in general it’s just lists of websites, but look you can also click images and now, instead of searching for websites, Google is searching for images now. For me, it remembered that I was interested in websites similar to that one that I liked.
If I go in and replace this just with the word, trees you’ll see all sorts of wonderful results that relate to trees in some cases, especially when it’s a common word or phrase, you’ll get other suggestions here at the top so notice. Google knows what a tree is, and it wants me to consider honing in and focusing in on a specific kind of tree. Why not an oak? So I click on OK changes. Why not a South Carolina tree now, I can go back and X out of those.
Ok – and I could choose something else: why not a cherry tree now? You can really drill down and get specific, so a cherry tree from Florida really kind of a fun way to hone in on a specific kind of image that you’re looking for now upon doing an image search like this. You get different search tools, so I’ve already showed you search tools, but that was for just website search results for image search results. You get lots of amazing options. You can go in here and choose the size of the image. I might want a large size image. So that it’s got lots of pixels, it’s gon na look crisp and beautiful, ok. So these are some examples of that. Now they don’t look large, but that’s because this is the thumbnail version of the image Google has made these images smaller so that they can fit on this page.
But if I were to click on one of these, let’s say this image here it gets a little bit bigger, but then I can go here where it says view image, and it takes me to the full resolution. Highest quality version of this image looks like this. One has a watermark, so I’m gon na X out of that and go back, but you can see that that’s how you get the higher version of the pictures. You click on the image, the small image it gets a little bigger. Then you click view image, and it shows you the highest quality version of the image. Sometimes, even then you can click on it with the magnifying glass and it’ll get even bigger.
Now, at this point, if I wanted to, if I needed it in a project for my class or whatever, I could right click on that image, save image as and save it to my desktop once it’s there on my desktop, I could use it in PowerPoint in Prezi in Word whatever I need to do so, that’s a that’s an image that I could use in all sorts of ways. Of course we should teach students to cite their sources, and so that’s a good thing to do it’s a very important thing to do. For teachers, as well as students and everybody really, but that’s an image, that’s easy to take and use in presentations and projects again giving credit. Okay, so remember how we found this large image of trees. I found it by using the search tools after doing an image search, and then I chose large from this list, but you can do exactly certain dimensions.
You can do larger than certain dimensions. You can get icon size any of these options. You can also choose color. Now you would assume that trees are brown and green. Well, this isn’t talking strictly about the tree.
It’S the photo itself. What color vibe doesn’t have, maybe pink, let’s try pink and see what happens. Okay, look at that the blossoms are pink, so pretty cool. Now I can switch that to yellow and you get a different set of results.
Orange again different results, beautiful results, so even blue. If you click on blue, we could have predicted this. That you’d have lots of blue skies, but this is a fun way to pick the exact picture that you’re interested in you could also go to black and white or transparent or full color. So these are different ways to get the image that you are looking for.
That you would like to find over here on type when you click on type. This will help rule out some of the images that you may not want. So you could say you only want face images now.
Remember I’m searching for a tree, so it’s kind of surprising to me that there’s some results that it found, but in many cases there’s a tree in the background. So anyway, you could also switch to just photo. So it’s not going to give you the part.
It’S not gon na give you drawings or you could go to clipart, you could go to drawings. We also have time we’ve already looked at this with regard to websites, but with images you can do the same kind of thing, custom range or images from the last week last day, this next one, maybe the most important one, especially for teachers and students. There’S the usage rights option and you’ll notice here that you can choose to only show images that are labeled for reuse, so these are images that the photographer has designated. I want these to be able to be reused. You know, without someone contacting me or whatever you can see, there’s no results, but if I take out South Carolina – and if I take out oh suddenly – there will be some good results also, I could change it from animated to any type. Okay.
So all of these choices have been limiting my results, so these are images that I can use free from worry with my students, and so can the students use them in their projects, still important to cite your source, but I think, there’s an extra level of freedom Because I’m using images that are labeled for Reeves, so what a powerful tool to find images to freely use with your students. We also have some other tools here. Like show sizes, you can make it so that the sizes appear.
So you get a sense of how many pixels, how big the image is. I’M gon na clear out all of that, and I just want you to know in addition to websites and images you can also search for shopping opportunities. I’M not gon na spend much time on that, but it is an option. You can also search for maps, and this is nice. I think it used to be the in order to use Google Maps you had to go to maps.google.com.
Well now you can just go to google.com, do a search for a place and then click on maps and it’ll. Take you to Google Maps for that specific place. I’M gon na click back and I’m gon na go back to all there’s also videos. To be honest, I don’t really recommend this. I haven’t found it to be that helpful. Google owns YouTube and YouTube really is the place to go, I think for video searches, but if you want to search right here inside of Google, you can, and it does give you some search tools. If you go into more there’s even more flights like I already showed you shopping, you can search for news results and then there’s this one.
If you do a search for books, it should find free public domain books. Let’S see if Tom Sawyer is in there, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and I can just click read and it should bring up the book so there it is. I can just browse down and start reading this book now. This book is old enough that it is public domain and I’m gon na be able to read. I believe, the entire book this way here at the left.
It says ebook free and it gives me some options for downloading as epub or PDF, and I could read this on my Kindle on my iPad on my cell phone on many different gadgets. I can also add it to my library. In many cases, though, you’re not going to find the entire book, what you’ll find is a portion of the book, but still it’s a great way to explore and find good books to read. So that is the beginner’s guide to using the Google search bar to find information and resources that you need thanks for watching this video and please consider subscribing to my youtube channel for more videos about technology for teachers and students and please watch for a new video At least every Monday .