It is estimated that around 90% of all web traffic passes through Google’s search engine today, giving the lie to the notion that despite the best efforts of rivals like Bing – even with its innovative AI integration – there are any realistic alternatives to the tech giant in this sector for businesses and consumers alike to focus on.
After all, the very fact that the name of the company has become a verb for web search points to its preeminence. But things are not as they once were. The internet is changing, with SEO optimization reconfiguring the way websites are structured, and generative AI looking set to overturn the way people access and seek information on the web.
What’s more, increasingly people are turning to alternative sources for search, from social media like TikTok, to LLMs. All of this raises the question of whether “to google it” is the best course of action for busy people needing information at their fingertips in 2024. Here we’d like to argue that it very much is, but with some caveats. The term Google-Fu gained prominence in the early 00s and referred to the collected skills necessary for a user to get the most out of search.
While platforms have increasingly learned from user behaviors in a bid to make them more palatable and accessible, knowing a few of the tricks of the trade can still make a huge impact on your search quality. Below we’re going to unpack some of the top ways you can supercharge your google search, as well as – crucially – learning to identify situations where you’re better off using alternative search methods.
Search Filtering
When you ask Google to search for a specific term, you’re largely leaving it up to the platform to decide what type of content you’re interested in seeing that matches your query. In light of this, it’s only natural that it will priorities high ranking results, and ones that are relatively recent. Thus if you’re looking for a specific article from a certain time period, you may struggle to surface it without some filtering.
Google actually has a wide range of filtering options on its search menu, letting you specify the type of result you’d like – be it image, map, news, shopping, financial information or more, and the time range for the result you’re interested in.
With this, you can search for results that come out in the past 24 hours if you’re tracking an emerging news story, or you can specify a custom date range if you’re researching a given period or trying to find a specific result from the past.
Bespoke Platforms
While Google is an excellent generalist, it can fall down when tasked with searching in a specific niche. This is because Google’s goal is to connect you with terms and results that match the keywords of your inquiry, and is less concerned with helping you navigate the nuances of a field you’re interested in.
For this reason, it’s often a good idea in such circumstances to seek out specialized platforms built around the niche you’re searching in. For example, gaming aficionados have a tall order before them when it comes to choosing an online casino to patronize as there are estimated to be over 20,000 such examples currently available online. Simply throwing “online casino” into Google just isn’t going to cut it here.
Instead, you’d be much better off seeking out a dedicated comparison and recommendation platform such as Bonuses.com as it not only knows the industry inside out, but is well positioned to furnish recommendations to users. Furthermore, in opting for a focused service like this, players get to benefit from the noteworthy savings and deals provided by it, with a host of competitive welcome offers and sign-up bonuses on offer.
Cheat Codes
There are a huge number of qualifiers you can add to your search terms to help the search provider understand what it is you’re looking for.
Among the most common of these are placing your query in between speech marks, which restricts results to an exact keyword match; prefixing the site with an url, such as site:example.com, which will limit results to the website in question; and adding a minus sign before any keywords you want to omit from your search – for example, “football -American” will help the engine focus on soccer results, rather than the NFL or other gridiron football.
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