How to be a Super Google Searcher

Ahhh, kids nowadays are so lucky! The internet and search engines only came into being towards the end of my college life. Doing research back then made me browse through several encyclopedias, sift through the card catalogue in the library, made me sneeze through old newspapers and made me go physically to the resource and even other libraries.

Things were much easier though during the time I was taking my MBA. Google was new back then and I immediately started using it. For a nerd like me, Google was heaven sent and I can say that I've been using Google for 12 years now! Wow!



Last week, Google Asia Pacific's regional product marketing manager for consumer products Jay Trinidad came to Manila to demo some new stuff on Google's search product. The following makes Google search faster, fresher and more intuitive:

Google Instant. Search results show as you type keywords. This saves you 2 to 5 seconds per query.

Caffeine. Caffeine is a new search index that provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches compared to its previous index. It is also the largest collection of web content Google has ever offered and will be the foundation in building a faster and more comprehensive search engine. (This is good news for bloggers too!)

Real-time search. Get highly relevant and freshest content from across the web. Shows results from micro blogs, news sites, blogs, web pages and public pages of social networks. This is great especially if you want to see fresh content about ongoing events because it provides information that is happening now.

Re-designed image search. I just tried this awhile ago and it's awesome. Try this: (1) search for "jeepney" on Google Image Search; (2) click on the color red at the lower left side of the page and notice that the results would page would show red jeepneys! (3) now try the other colors. Jay (my hubby) and I tried searching for celebrity photos too!

You can also use other "operators" to make searching on Google easier. The operators I use more often are "define" and "site:" (for searching only a specific website), and I use Google often as a calculator. Check out the Google Cheat Sheet to become a super Google searcher like me!