How To Tell Google What You Are Searching For When Using Words With Multiple Meanings

How many times have you searched Google only to have millions of results returned that have nothing to do about what you're searching for? Probably often. After all Google is a computer and almost robot like.

….not really.

Actually Google is pretty smart, especially when you give it a little help with finding exactly what you are searching for. But how do you tell it to find things with words or phrases that have multiple meanings?

Well, since Google is a computer (one big gigantic computer), it can accept commands with the words or phrases you are searching for, just like using a command prompt in Windows.

Here's an example. If you searched for the word batter , Google is going to return a whole slew of search results ranging from batter in terms of Baseball, to batter in terms of cooking and so on.

So, to tell Google that you just want search results for batter relating to Baseball, just use a hyphen (minus sign) and the category you want to exclude after the word you are searching for. For example to exclude cooking with the word batter use the following format:

batter -cooking

Google will return search results that are more relevant based on the query you enter and remove items that don't relate specifically to cooking.

Now, you will probably notice that even though you told Google to exclude a certain category, it still not perfect and other type of results will be mixed in. To get better search results, you should try to be more specific and use phrases.

So using the above example, if you used the phrase baseball batter -cooking the results return will be more specific and you will have less non-relevant items to sift through. To get better results, use two, three or even four word phrases.

As you can see, the Internet is huge, and Google does it;s best to find the possible combinations you are looking for, Sometimes it just needs a little help with understanding exactly what you are searching for.