Someone who searches all day every day might call this overkill for a skill this person already possesses. I mean, searching for stuff is what I do for my job all day long. CTRL+F is an amateur move. If that qualifies as something that puts someone in the 90th percentile, then how hard could the rest of the class be? But, I soon learned Googling isn't just a skill, it's a series of skills. You can choose to just type into that empty box. Or you can take this class and join the 1 percent of Google Searchers. But beware: getting into this elite of searchers involves watching some very dry YouTube videos. Since I've already spent the time with professor Russell and have weeks of Googling with my new tricks behind me, let me give you my little cheat sheet.

Site Search

The Problem This Fixes: Often I find myself looking for a particular article from a particular blog or website but I can't remember the headline. Or, other times I want to see all the things a certain site wrote about a certain thing.

How It Works: You can limit a search to one website using a site search. It's very easy. Say I want to find articles about a topic just from theatlanticwire.com. In the Google box, I type "site:Theatlanticwire.com" followed by my search term. That will surface only results from the websites www.theatlanticwire.com, as you can see below.

"Removing Invasive Results"

The Problem This Fixes: Sometimes while Googling for one thing, the same wrong result comes up for a different thing. This skill will remove those results that are just getting in the way. For example, maybe you want a salsa recipe, but hate cilantro. This will help get rid of those results with cilantro.

How It Works: This demonstrates the power of the minus sign. Simply putting it in front of the term you want to get rid of will remove any results including that word, as you can see below. By the way, any of these commands can be combined. So say you want to remove an entire website from the equation -site:theatlanticwire.com would have that effect.

Google Image Search

The Problem This Fixes: Sometimes an image comes across your screen and you want to know more about it. Google's Image search allows you to

How It Works: Head to google.com/images. In addition to entering text, the search box allows you to upload photos by clicking the camera icon, as shown below.

After either uploading or pasting the URL link of the photo in question, Google will then find search results based on that, surfacing news articles that feature the photo and "visually similar images." This kind of thing comes in handywhen trying to confirm or deny if a storm photo, for example, is legitimate. (Something you might have wanted to do during Hurricane Sandy).

Google Operators

The Problem This Fixes: A lot of the times we want to filter our results one way or another. Google search relies on a series of "operators" to do that. The site search is just one of those. You can also filter by filetype and search in between certain numbers and do all sorts of things.