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Little Known Ways To Power Your Google Search. Home » Data Visualization » How to be a Google Power User New round here? Be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed. It’s a familiar frustration for most of us: You type your precise, specific search terms into Google, and expect to find what you need on the first page. Instead, you’re faced with millions of search results, and the first few links are so off-the-wall unrelated you wonder if you mistyped something. But your search terms are correct, so why doesn’t Google know what you’re looking for? Though Google keeps improving their algorithms, there are still plenty of terms that stymie the search engine. Luckily, Google has quite a few hidden tips and tricks for searching that will help you quickly find exactly the results you’re looking for. Just by learning a few formatting and punctuation tricks, you can tell Google how your search terms are related, or exclude certain words or phrases.

Faster and more accurate searches aren’t the only benefit to becoming a Google power user. Blank Weather. Search operators - Search Help. You can use symbols or words in your search to make your search results more precise. Google Search usually ignores punctuation that isn’t part of a search operator. Don’t put spaces between the symbol or word and your search term. A search for site:nytimes.com will work, but site: nytimes.com won’t. Refine image searches Overall Advanced Search Go to Advanced Image Search. Search for an exact image size Right after the word you're looking for, add the text imagesize:widthxheight.

Example: imagesize:500x400 Common search techniques Search social media Put @ in front of a word to search social media. Search for a price Put $ in front of a number. Search hashtags Put # in front of a word. Exclude words from your search Put - in front of a word you want to leave out. Search for an exact match Put a word or phrase inside quotes. Search within a range of numbers Put .. between two numbers. Combine searches Put "OR" between each search query. Search for a specific site Search for related sites. Youpd. Google Maps: 10 Handy Tricks You Should Know. Master Your Browser's Tabs with These Tricks and Extensions.

Nine smart ways to use tabs in Chrome. 181 Google Tricks That Will Save You Time. 100+ Google Tricks That Will Save You Time in School – Eternal Code. [via onlinecolleges.net] With classes, homework, and projects–not to mention your social life–time is truly at a premium for you, so why not latch onto the wide world that Google has to offer?

From super-effective search tricks to Google hacks specifically for education to tricks and tips for using Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Calendar, these tricks will surely save you some precious time. Search Tricks These search tricks can save you time when researching online for your next project or just to find out what time it is across the world, so start using these right away. Convert units. Google Specifically for Education From Google Scholar that returns only results from scholarly literature to learning more about computer science, these Google items will help you at school.

Google Scholar. Google Docs Google Docs is a great replacement for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, so learn how to use this product even more efficiently. Use premade templates. Gmail Use the Tasks as a to-do list. Ten Search Tools and Tactics Teachers and Students Need to Know. I often find myself in conversations with teachers and students about Internet search strategies. Often times the conversation reminds me that what's obvious to me is amazing to someone else. Last week I had that very experience as I taught a couple of teachers some search techniques that they are going to pass along to their students.

As a follow-up to that experience, I've crafted the following list of search tools and tactics that every teacher and student should know. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Sweet Search is a search engine that searches only the sites that have been reviewed and approved by a team of librarians, teachers, and research experts. Wolfram Alpha is billed as a computational search engine and this is exactly what it does. Twurdy is search tool that automatically displays the readability of your search results for you. Twurdy with Pop - searches using Twurdy's most complex algorithm which includes looking up the popularity of words within the text. 10. Google Docs. Why Google Docs? Google Apps is a tremendous platform for facilitating online collaboration in your classroom, or beyond. It is freely available on the Web and if you are familiar with other word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation programs, you can easily use Google Docs.

The chat feature on presentations makes it possible to create a "permeable classroom" by bringing experts into a lesson to interact with students online. Here are some benefits of Google Docs: It is available from anywhere and anytime with an Internet connection. Instead of emailing files back and forth, Google Docs allows people to work on a single version of a document online. There is no need to download software or worry about conflicting software versions.

Note: Google Docs in part of Google Apps, a suite of tools that also includes Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, and Google Sites (for web page creation). Google Docs Tools Google Docs is comprised of five tools that all work together. Why Google Plus Hangouts is the Killer App: Docs. Google Plus got a bunch of new features today, many of them involving Hangouts, the video chat feature.

This is not the only social network with video chat in town, but Hangouts always had some stand-out features. First of all, they can be public, so anyone can see one in their stream and join in, which is a very honest interpretation of the word "social. " They also support two-way chat for up to 10 people, which can be chaotic, but often in a fun way.

Today's update brought Hangouts to mobile devices, and it added "On Air" mode to allow users to broadcast to the public (once On Air opens to everyone, that is). All these features sound like fun. Making Stuff Together With screensharing and a shared sketchpad, and especially with Docs, Google Plus is now a platform for making stuff together, face-to-face. Plus for the Enterprise? So, does that mean enterprise collaboration suites like Citrix or WebEx are in danger? Would you use Google Plus Hangouts for work? Use Gmail, Docs, Google Calendar Offline With the Chrome App. Last week Google launched the Offline Google Mail Chrome App. The app which is available for free in the Chrome Web Store will allow you to read and respond to messages in Gmail even if you don't have an Internet connection. When you get to a place where you do have an Internet connection your messages will be sent.

Items in your Google Docs and Google Calendar accounts can also be viewed offline now. Unfortunately, Google still hasn't made it possible for you to create new content in those services without an Internet connection. Hopefully that will appear soon. Applications for Education When I read about the new Google Mail Chrome App I immediately thought of my students who spend close to an hour on a school bus each morning and afternoon.

The app could be useful for those students who want to get some work done during that time when they don't have Internet access. Best Chrome Extensions. Google+ For Educators. 10 ways to use Google+ in the classroom | The Theatre Professor. Circles Obviously you are going to want to create a circle for your class and guide them through making a circle for the class as well. But as cool as that is, it doesn’t stop there. You can also make a circle for announcements and important links and drop any posts in that you know you may use every semester. Then you just find it in the stream for that circle and repost to your current class when you are ready.

You can also create circles for students by category. I tend to keep theatre students with me from class to class so I have created a circle for current theatre students who might want to receive updates about upcoming events at our theatre or other’s in the city. Photos/Video Because photos and videos are dropped into albums, privacy settings allow you to make albums that only certain circles can see.

Google Talk Ability to control notification methods Mobile apps Google+ now has a mobile app available for iPhone and for Droid. Group Work Google Docs and Calendar Hang outs Michelle. Managing Google+ Circles : 7 Essential Tips. One of Google+’s main advantages is privacy management by way of organizing your friends into different circles. While this makes perfect sense, this idea isn’t as intuitive as you might think because of the years of Facebook and Twitter habits ingrained in us.

As it is a new concept, some people feel circles are cumbersome and tedious to manage – but it doesn’t need to be that way. Not at least, if you follow these essential tips: 1. Don’t feel obliged to add someone into a circle Unlike facebook and just like twitter, you don’t have to approve people who want to connect with you on Google+ . So the rule of thumb, if you don’t want to listen to this person’s stream, you probably shouldn’t add them to any circle at all – not even your acquaintance circle.

This greatly lessens the burden of managing circles, and dramatically cuts down on the noise you get in your stream. 2. People you know probably come from different groups. A: People I want to share my general status updates 3. 4. 5. 6. 6. 5 Years of YouTube Politics [INFOGRAPHIC] YouTube, which has quickly become the media site of record, has put together an infographic celebrating five years of political highs and lows. If someone important does anything wonderful, stupid or wonderfully stupid on camera — it is likely the site has the video.

This is typically true of the political arena, as politicians often make gaffes while they're on the road, whether it's during bill debates or a casual conversation. YouTube and other video hosting sites provide a place where the public can find and watch hours of clips featuring elected officials. More than 500 U.S. candidates for office have official channels. Of course, it's not all fail videos and mistakes, YouTube has also played an increasingly large role in elections and the day-to-day operations of the White House. So now the site has gone back and traced its complicated but important relationship with American politics starting with then-Sen. 31 Essential Google+ Resources. How Google Dominates Us by James Gleick. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy Simon and Schuster, 424 pp., $26.00 I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 by Douglas Edwards Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 416 pp., $27.00 The Googlization of Everything (and Why We Should Worry) by Siva Vaidhyanathan University of California Press, 265 pp., $26.95 Search & Destroy: Why You Can’t Trust Google Inc. by Scott Cleland with Ira Brodsky Telescope, 329 pp., $28.95 Tweets Alain de Botton, philosopher, author, and now online aphorist: The logical conclusion of our relationship to computers: expectantly to type “what is the meaning of my life” into Google.

You can do this, of course. Google is where we go for answers. The business of finding facts has been an important gear in the workings of human knowledge, and the technology has just been upgraded from rubber band to nuclear reactor. Most of the time Google does not actually have the answers. “That’s true,” said Brin. Behind Google+'s Stealth March On Foursquare, Instagram, Gaming, Facebook, Your Life. Foursquare-challenging check-ins If you run the mobile app version of Google+ you can't help but spot the Check-ins feature--it's right there on the front page.

It works with admirable simplicity: Push it, select the appropriate location which is spewed from Google Place's database, and tap "check in. " Similar check-in status is afforded when you enable a status update to have a location attached. Privacy is neatly managed within Circles, and if you can bother to spend the time, you can change each check-in's sharing status. Plenty is missing from this bare-bones service: There're no badges, no mayorships, no location-based deal vouchers in association with AmEx. in short, it's not a game.

It's just a shared check-in service. But that's not to say that Google won't implement some or all of these features or even surpass them--it's not short of coders, and if Google+ takes off then it would probably be mere weeks of work to get a gaming angle built in. Gaming versus everyone Facebook. Google's uProxy: A Peer-to-Peer Gateway to Internet Freedom. In parts of the world where repressive governments control the Internet with unassailable firewalls, netizens don't see the same web that people in other countries can. Now, Google wants to give people in these countries a tool to circumvent those invisible barriers, and defeat censorship. Called uProxy, it is meant to be an easy-to-use, peer-to-peer gateway to the open Internet. With uProxy installed, somebody in Iran could use a friend's Internet to connect with him or her. Though Google announced uProxy on Monday at the Google Ideas Summit in New York, N.Y., the tool isn't ready to be made public yet, and the Internet giant isn't comfortable announcing a release date.

First, it wants to roll it out for a few "trusted testers" to improve it and make it more secure. The user in Iran, for instance, would be able to ask a friend in the United States via chat to activate uProxy. "It's basically a personalized VPN [Virtual Private Network]," Dixon told Mashable in an interview.