Internet Searches

How to use search like a pro: 10 tips & tricks for Google & beyond - The Guardian (15/1/16):

1. Exact phrase
2. Exclude terms
3. Either OR
4. Synonym search
5. Search within a site
6. The power of the asterisk
7. Searching between two values
8. Search for word in the body, title or URL of a page
9. Search for related sites
10. Combine them

Thanks jo anne

You're welcome, Jazzy, most of the tips are new to me & I'm looking forward to testing them out.

I use some of them jo anne, but wasn't aware of others. I'm going to make a note of them though, cos it's quite overwhelming when you get 3 million hits!

Dostaf was good at Googlism.

He knew nowt bowt it, or so he had us believe, Lapis Lazuli.

also look at metadata and meta search engines. internet is like the sea. Google is like a trawler just skimming over the top of the water, meta engines go deep.

Thanks, Paul McNamara, I remember Dogpile being discussed - Thread (Mar 2013)

I’ve just seen this on Twitter and it’s worth doing!

Google: “meteorite”

Once upon a time, you could type into Google Translate:
The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,
Translate it into Russian
Re-enter the Russian text
Google translate it back to English, and you got

The Vodka is good but the meat is rotten

Google quickly moved to treat the piece as an idiom, and provide a more appropriate translation.

BUT, they spoiled things by claiming you never were able to do the former.

It was so obviously a lie.

All you had to do was type something like:

Willing was the spirit although the flesh be weak or similar variants on the original to once more get bizarre results.

I like that, Ena M, the perils of translating.

Looking on Twitter, the mistake has been discussed a number of times.

A tweet in reply to someone questioning their own spelling of “damned sight”, saying it looked weird:

That's a good un. Made me laugh.