With the right searching skills you can get immediate, well-honed results that mean you won’t have to scroll through its pages of irrevelant results to find what you’re looking for. You can tell Google to disregard certain words or phrases, tell it to search within websites or even narrow down your query to things like exact pricing or location.

THE WEIRDEST THINGS SEARCHED FOR ON GOOGLE

Website hosting company whoishostingthis.com has created a great infographic showing how using these hidden tips can unlock Google’s extra power and make you a Google guru.

There’s a lot of stuff out there on the web so by filtering out all the unwanted stuff you’re going to get what you’re looking for a lot quicker. You can search exact phrases and find results that have more than one context. It’s a bit like asking for a chicken sandwich on Turkish with no butter rather than just saying ‘sandwich’ and seeing what you get.

A rather smart feature of Google is being able to pull out information from specific sites so you don’t have to go clicking through a rabbit hole of menus and tabs. Also, if you’re on the right track but might need more sources then you don’t have to go searching for alternative sites, Google does it for you.

By searching for certain words in the body text of web pages you can fine tune your findings.

Or, you can easily pull up web results that will be dedicated to exact words in your search but also will have keywords elsewhere on the page. This can help you put subjects into context so if you’re looking for an article about something specific about a flu shot, this is a great trick.

While Google is clever enough to realise where abouts in the world you are searching from and will bring geo-specific results it can still throw up odd websites from different countries. A geographical-based location search is easily executed and is particularly useful if you’re searching for something like news for a particular country. Another great feature you might not know about is the ability to find certain file types. You can type in the suffix of, say, a PDF and you’ll only see those, which is a great tool for research.

Here’s one for the shoppers. Buying anything online can be a bit of an open ocean with so many websites offering products at different prices. You can lock things down by searching within your budget simply by putting two full stops between the prices. And, if you’re one of those people who isn’t great at remembering profound quotes or song titles the use of an asterisk will help fill in those mental gaps.

Not that we’re advocating the poor use of grammar but, aside from the examples above, Google doesn’t actually recognise punctuation so you don’t have to waste time moving your little finger those few millimetres to stick in apostrophes and commas. However, Google does recognise these and can strongly help your search results:

Right, so now you’re got a few extra search moves under your belt here are a couple more tricks you might not know Google could do. From finding the current time in countries around the world, tracking a parcel, converting currency or even telling you your IP address these could be time saving strokes of smartness: