Last week I found a post on Huffington Post titled Handy Google Search Tips: 19 Simple Tricks You Need To Know. I went through them and realized many of them would be useful for someone in a job search… here are my fav’s:
5. look up definitions. I think I know the meaning of many words but sometimes I want to BE SURE I am not saying something wrong… it’s easy to make sure I’m using the right word. I can do what this slide says, or if your browser is set to use Google as the default search engine (I think Firefox and Chrome are automatically set up to use Google), just put in “define _______” … I do this daily.
6. search a specific site. Did you know you can limit your search to just one website? For example, this search is for all jobs at the American Express website.
7. Get directions. Another favorite, I use this to find out what my trip looks like and how much time to budget. I usually get there by going to maps.google.com but this shows a different way.
8. find the time. MOST of my work (phone calls) are within the four major time zones in the United States. But every once in a while I have a call with someone in Israel, Australia, the UK, etc. This is a handy tool to help me do the math to figure out what 9am Mountain Time means for the person I’m calling.
9. search area codes. When I see a call come in I can quickly get an idea of where the caller is by looking up their area code… here’s how you do that in google (in my browser I type in “area code ###”
13. eliminate unwanted results. When you are doing research on a company or industry you might find one term or word that monopolizes the results. If you want to clean up the results and get rid of that term it’s quite easy… just do something like this (as per the slide): “oil spill -bp” — this takes out all results that have BP, who is quite, um, popular these days with the term “oil spill.”
14. check stocks. If you are looking at bigger companies this might be important for you as you prepare for interviews or look for networking discuss fodder. It’s easy to find stock info using Google.
19. search related terms. Maybe you aren’t thinking out of the box enough… if you are only using one key word for doing research you might be overlooking other, more popular words. Do this ~search to find related terms and their search results.
20. traffic forecast. Similar to #7 above but with the benefit of padding your travel plans based on traffic. If you are going to a new part of town you should seriously check this out – that harmless back road might get a lot more congested than you ever imagined, and you don’t want to be late for your interview!
There you go – there’s more you can do with Google, but I picked the ones I thought would be useful to you in a job search!
