Simple Google Tips and Tricks That Can Enhance Your Productivity

The tools we use online are super helpful and help us accomplish our daily tasks in a simple and effective way. They help us communicate with friends, family, and work and empower us to be creative and innovative. The goal of this week’s blog is to show hidden tips and tricks found in Google Suite to bring you to the next level in your productivity.

Did you know that there’s a better way to search for information on Google? You may be frustrated with the results you find, having to dig through the search list to get the result you want. But there’s a helpful way to narrow down and optimize your search results. There’s more to the Google search engine than just searching for a keyword or term. The first helpful tip is to use double quotes in your search box to get the exact phrase in your search results. 

When you use double quotes, you will get results that only show exactly what is in the double quotes like in this picture above. This is useful if you are trying to filter your results and want only an exact term. Additionally, another trick to find information from just one site is type the following into Google:

site:apple.com

If you type a search like this into Google, you will get results only from Apple. If you would like to search for something specific on a website, you can type the search like this:

iPhone 13 site:apple.com 

Moreover, if you would like to exclude something from you search result simply add a dash and it will do it for you. For example, you could type

iPhone 13 Pro -verizon -sprint

This search will not show results for the iPhone 13 Pro from Verizon and Sprint. Instead, you will probably get different carriers like AT&T in your search. There’s even more advanced tricks to dive deeper in which you can find here.

I think these tips and tricks really give the user ultimate controllability over their search so that they can find precisely what they are looking for. It helps personalize search results so you aren’t just getting the same results as everyone else gets.

Another feature of the Google Suite that many don’t know about is Google Scholar. Google Scholar (see here) is a professional database research site which can help you find peer-reviewed sources for your research papers. One of the nice things about it is that the same search tricks as previously mentioned work on this platform so you can pin-point your search results. You can also use the “author:” operator to find a specific author you want to read from. I personally have used Google Scholar in the past for formal papers and it has been a great help, especially since it automatically gives you in-text citations which can get a little cumbersome. But if for some reason one of the sources from Google Scholar doesn’t give you a citation in MLA/APA format you can use my favorite in-text citation generator KnightCite to create one. KnightCite has been my go to when I don’t use Google Scholar. Also on Google Scholar you can also save your articles in the library to easily access them and organize them.

One other practical tool that I wanted to share in this blog is extensions, specifically Google Chrome extensions. An extension is basically an “add on” or “plug-in” which can be easily downloaded onto your Google chrome browser. Extensions can range from tools which allows you to better organize your emails, adblockers to stop ads from protruding your webpage, or file converters to easily convert files into different formats and much more. 

I use adblocker on my personal computer as it keeps it running smoother and I don’t have to see intrusive adds which degrade my viewing experience. There’s more extensions like Microsoft’s OneNote web-clipper which allows you to clip segments on webpages and edit them and Loom for Chrome which is a better way to record your screen, face, and voice instead of opening another program.