My wife is an attorney, and her favorite coffee mug says "Please Don't Confuse Your Google Search With My Law Degree." It's a common issue all professionals face, including attorneys, doctors, and private eyes. Don't get me wrong, Google is a great resource, but it's only one of many that a skilled and experienced private detective should use. In fact, if you do a proper Google search yourself, you could probably find some starter information that will give your hired detective a leg up in their own searches. This means they could save hours on your case, which potentially saving you hundreds of dollars.
But do you actually know how to use Google? More than just typing in a question?
There are dozens, if not hundreds, of powerful tools that Google provides that you might not be aware of. I've compiled a list of some of my favorites. Here are some tricks to get more out of your Google searches. The search terms themselves will be stylized like this. The green text with a black background will let you know what actually goes in the Google bar.
1. Exact Terms
This one's commonly known. By putting a phrase in quotation marks, you can ask Google to only show results with that exact phrase. Let's say you wanted to do a Google search on a man named Robert Jones. Just typing those two words, Robert Jones, into the search bar tells Google that you want both words to appear in your result, but not necessarily together and in that order. Typing it as "Robert Jones" will give you results with those two words, together.
Pro-tip: when you're doing a search, even on a name more unique than "Robert Jones," you should be prepared to do multiple searches with various ways the name could be written. "Robert Jones" might provide a different result than "Jones, Robert" or "Jones, R."
2. Excluding Terms
You can put a hyphen in front of a word you want to leave out of a Google search. Say, for example, you do a search for Robert Jones. Most iterations of that name will returns results for a former football player for the Miami Dolphins. If that's the Robert Jones you're searching for: great! You're done! If not, try doing a search for "robert jones" -miami to exclude Miami. You'll find several new options, none of which contain the word Miami.
3. Specific Websites
Google normally returns results for hundreds, if not thousands of different websites depending on what you are searching for. Let's say you want to do a search for Robert Jones on the Harvard University website. Simply typing in harvard university robert jones will have Google scour the entire Internet for those terms. You'll find LinkedIn profiles, obituaries, news articles, etc. But if you type site:harvard.edu "robert jones" then Google will only provide results that are actually from Harvard's website.
4. Combining Searches
When you want Google to search for more than one term, and you want both terms to be found, use the word OR between them. Both letters have to be capitalized for it to work. A search for robert OR jones will provide search results for "robert," as well as search results for "jones." You can combine this with the Exact Terms pro-tip, above, to search for multiple name variations at once. "robert jones" OR "jones, robert"
5. "AROUND"
This one is my favorite. You can do a search for terms within a close proximity to each other by typing the word AROUND(X) between them, substituting the X with a number. The higher the number, the further away the search terms are allowed to be. Let's say, for example, that you've recently heard a song you can't get out of your head, but you don't know it's name, artist, or most of the lyrics. All you can remember is that the word "fallacy" was in the same stanza as the word "spiralling." Even by combining the two, you won't get the right song, and you can't combine them because you know that they were near each other, but not directly adjacent. So, by doing a search for "fallacy" AROUND(10) "spiralling" song you can ask Google to show you results where those two terms are within ten words of each other. Give it a try! It's a good song.
6. File Types
Sometimes you may already know what kind of file type you want, like PDF. In that case, you'd want Google to avoid results that are websites entirely. Unless a website links directly to the file you're looking for, website search results won't be helpful. By typing filetype:pdf you can filter out everything that isn't a PDF.
7. In The URL
This will find results where the searched term is in the actual URL of the website Google returns, not in the body of the page itself. I personally use this for finding social media profiles, among other things. A search for Robert Jones would look like inurl:robertjones. This would return results that have "robertjones" in the URL. This tip can also be useful for refining a search by domain (that's the .com or .edu part of the URL), by adding inurl:edu to a search.
By combining these tricks, you can get some really advanced Google searches. Try it out for yourself! For example, if you wanted to see what the preliminary budget for Baltimore City was for the year 2022, you could type in "preliminary budget baltimore city 2022." Doing so would give you over seven hundred thousand results, many of which are secondary sources or social media. Plug this into your search bar instead:
filetype:pdf "budget AROUND(10) preliminary" "baltimore city" inurl:gov "2022"
That gives us a mere ten results all from a .gov webpage. And would you look at that, the first one is what we're looking for. That's time saved, which is money saved.
Happy searching!
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