- Create More Effective Queries
- Fine-Tune Your Search Results
- Sign In for Personalized Results
- Search Smarter
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Fine-Tune Your Search Results
Once you’ve entered a query, Google displays the first page of your search results. If you think the results are a little too broad, you can narrow them down a bit using the search tools located in the left-hand sidebar.
These search tools let you filter your results in several different ways. For example, you can opt to display only sites with images or with a certain reading level, or pages created or updated within a given time period. You employ these search tools after you’ve entered your query, thus redisplaying the (newly filtered) results.
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Figure 3 Search tools found in the left column of a Google search results page.
To use Google’s search tools, conduct a search as you would normally. By default, Google displays all types of results, as evidenced by the selection of Everything in the search tools. From there, click any of the links to filter your results accordingly.
What search tools are available? Here’s the list
- Display results by type. At the very top of the left sidebar you see a series of links that display only certain types of results—Everything (all web pages), Images, Videos, News, Shopping, and Books. To display even more types of results—Places, Blogs, Discussions, Recipes, and Patents—click the More link.
- Display results by location. By default, Google uses the location entered in your Google Account to display nearby businesses and such in your results. You can change this default location by clicking the Change Location link in the sidebar.
- Display recent results. To display only the most recent search results, you have to narrow the results by date., To do this, click a date range in the Search Tools sidebar. You can filter results by Past Hour, Past 24 Hours, Past 2 Days, Past Week, Past Month, or Past Year. To select a custom date range, click Custom Range and then enter a beginning and end date.
- Display sites with images. If you’re looking for websites that contain images, as opposed to those that are text-only, click the Sites with Images link.
- Display related searches. Click the Related Searches link to display results for searches similar to the one you originally entered.
- Display results by date. This is a little different from the previous date filtering. Click the Timeline link to display results in chronological order, with a graphical timeline at the top of the page.
- Display pages visited and not yet visited. If you want to avoid pages you’ve previously visited, filter them out by clicking the Not Yet Visited link. If you want to revisit pages you’ve previously viewed, click the Visited link.
- Display definitions. To display dictionary results for the word(s) in your query, click the Dictionary link.
- Filter results by reading level. To filter results pages by reading level, with a reading level graph at the top of the results page, click the Reading Level link.
- Display results from your social network. To display results from blogs and people you follow on various social networks, including Google+, click the Social link.
- Display nearby businesses. Click the Nearby link to display pages for those businesses near your present location.
- Display translated pages. To display translated foreign pages by language, click the Translated Foreign Pages link.
The filtered results are displayed when you click one of these search tools links; you don’t have to click the Search button to initiate a new search.