Using Google Search More Productively

When we want to find something on the web we turn to the search engines for help. Google is one of those search engines that help us find things. Today I though of sharing with you some tricks to easily find what you are looking for.
For convenience I will include all search queries inside "[" and "]".

Including terms inside double quotes will find you the exact match. For example, let us say that a software that you are using/writing is throwing an error. Let us say that the error is "could not open file". If someone else encountered this problem before you and asked for help online, then the phrase would exist in the same format and same words. But using the query [could not open file] would not find exact matches but similar ones. So if you want to find exact matches you can search with the phrase inside double quotes marks. So the search query ["could not open file"] would bring you results more relevant to your problem than the query [could not open file].

Another thing that we search the web for is opinions and reviews others have about products/services. As we all know such opinions and reviews are most found on blogs. For example let us say that we want to find a site that offers images for free(with no strings attached). If you use the Google query [free images] you will find several sites that say that they offer free images. But when you go to the actual site they say that you have to include a link to their site wherever you use the images. If someone found a site where they offer images for free they would have mentioned it in their blog. We can use Google to search all the  "wordpress.com" or "blogger.com" sites for the phrase "free images" using the query [free images site:wordpress.com] or [free images site:blogger.com]. You can also choose to double quote the search phrase to find an exact match as ["free images" site:wordpress.com].
Or let us take our first example. Let us say that the error "could not open file" is thrown by a php program that you are writing. Then you would find the answer on the php.net site or on a programming discussion site such as stackoverflow.com. You can use the queries ["could not open file" site:php.net] and ["could not open file" site:stackoverflow.com] to search those sites and find your answers.

You would probably have seen search functions provided within web sites. For example the zend framework site provides a search functionality which allows us to search the site. But what I experienced was that searching via Google provided faster results than using the search provided within the site. For example searching for the phrase "Zend_Application" via Google gave faster results than searching via the zend framework site.

You can find more help on using Google search here and here. They are sources provided by Google. I just thought of mentioning a few use cases so that anyone reading this blog can understand how to utilize the functionality that Google provides. Hope these tips will be useful to you.