With the holiday season just around the corner, you’ll be spending a lot of time on the Internet trying to find the perfect gifts for the loved ones in your life… but do you actually know how to find exactly what you’re looking for? Today, we want to give you a holiday gift in the form of a guide on how to make the most of Google’s search functionality.
Quotes: The Key to Specificity
Take a step back into 1996’s Jingle All the Way, in which Howard Langston spends most of the movie trying to find a very specific Turbo-Man action figure on Christmas Eve.
While it’s certainly admirable to work as hard as Langston does, this commitment does become a problem when faced with a little last-minute shopping—a problem that knowing how to use Google could solve. If Langston did a Google Search for the exact kind of Turbo-Man his son wanted, he could narrow it down in moments. I mean, how else are you supposed to find a 12-inch Turbo-Man with Turbo-Rang and Jetpack accessories? Just type in:
“12 inch Deluxe Turbo-Man with Turbo-Rang and Jetpack”
With the quotes, Langston can find the exact match for this toy, or even gauge interest in products or services of his own.
The Minus Sign: For Removing Certain Types of Gifts
Gift subscriptions and cards are some of the more common gifts to give, but some individuals are particular about which websites and platforms they want to give their business to.
Google doesn’t know this, of course, so you have to tell it to omit certain results. This is done with a minus sign in front of whatever terms you don’t want included in a search. Now, imagine if, in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, Clark Griswold’s boss had applied this knowledge instead of giving him a Christmas “bonus” of a year-long subscription to a “Jelly of the Month” club. It would be a simple search for “gift idea -jelly,” and the entire display could have been avoided.
You can also use this to find gifts for others, or, say, purchase new computer hardware. A fun example is searching “mouse -rodent” to guarantee you won’t get any pest removal products in your results.
Site: For Single-Source Searches
For those who like to do their shopping in-person at specific stores, there’s a Google feature that lets you emulate this experience by preceding your search terms with “site:URL”
This trick tells Google you only want to see results that pop up on the specific website of your choice. It’s like a modern-day version of Kris Kringle in the 1947 classic, Miracle on 34th Street, where the last-minute Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade Santa tells parents where to find their child’s exact wishes. The mother seeking a toy fire engine for her son could have just typed up “site:schoenfeldtoys.com fire engine” to find exactly what her son wanted.
Business owners can of course use this method to conduct their own market research and track competitors.
The Gift of Technology
Technology is supposed to be convenient and make certain tasks less time-consuming, so why not let it do its job for your business? Fusion IT can help you acquire the right tools for any job. Learn more by calling us today at (616) 828-5360.