#txgoo part II

What Do You Love?

Searching in Google is great but sometimes you have to wade through millions of results to find what you want. Enter What Do you Love? from Google.  WDYL takes your search and turns it into categories. This reminds me of the Pinterest layout. And I love Pinterest!

Searching within a site

Some websites have a custom search engine you can use to search within the site. If it doesn't, you can use the "site" operator to create your own custom search. In the search bar (also called the omnibox), use the site operator in front of the URL to create the search. After the URL, put a space and then the search term.  For example: site:www.pablopicasso.org paintings This will search the pablopicasso.org website with the search term "paintings."

You can see that all of these results are confined to the pablopicasso.org website.

#txgoo part I

Saturday I attended the 2014 Texas Google Summit in Brenham. Wow. There is so much to share. I decided to divide up the day into multiple posts.

Power searching in Google. 

Monica Martinez' session was all about getting better results from a Google search. Search operators are the key to narrowing down the number of hits.

• File Type - Search for a specific file type. For example, if your lesson is about the Cold War, you could search for presentations that others have already created. You can change ppt to pdf, doc, jpg, etc. depending on the type of file you are looking for. If you're not sure what type of file or the extension of the file, here is a list of just about any file you can think of.

• Image Search Options - Use the advanced search options for images to find what you really need. After the initial search, choose the images tab. Then click on the Search tools menu to get more options. You can filter by size, color, type, etc.  I especially like the Usage rights options. This enables you to narrow your search to copyright free images or images that you are allowed to use. 

Check out her site for more of Monica's presentation on Power Searching.

Stay tuned for more greatness from #txgoo 2014!