How To Find Anything On The Internet

Learning to navigate the World Wide Web effectively is an important skill, and there are lots of different ways for you to find the information you are looking for.
As well as the advanced search function, there are a load of operator hacks you can use to refine your search results. Check out the excellent Google Guide for a full list.

Here is a selection of some useful ones:

• salsa -dance will find pages containing “salsa” but not “dance”
• castle ~glossary will find pages containing glossaries and terminology related to “castle”
• define:trick will bring up definitions of the word “trick”
• ~crocodile will search for the word “crocodile” and similar words
• lon sfo to book flights from London to San Francisco
• delta flight 5778 to check the status of this flight
• what time is it in New York to find out the time in this city
• fb pass 2013 site:www.bluetechno.blogspot.com to search only Bluetechno blog for the word “fb pass 2013”
• fb pass 2013 -site:www.bluetechno.blogspot.com to exclude Blutechno blog results from your search for “fb pass 2013”

Online Research:

Conducting online research is about more than just typing a few words into Google, even if you do know the operator hacks! There are a lot of resources out there to help you. Here’s how to find:

Etymology: Find the root of any word at Etymoline.

Newspapers: Newspapers dating back hundreds of years are available at the Google News Archives, but you can also use LexisNexis if you’ve got a subscription or can log on via a university network.

Scholarly Sources: Google Scholar is a compendium of thousands of research articles. Other good resources include the JSTOR database, and the excellent paid service, Questia.

And if you want to tap into the ‘digital brain’ of the Internet, use the twitter search feature and check out the most popular Google Insight stats to see what the online population are thinking about.

Finding Multimedia:

Pretty pictures and lovely sounds make the (cyber) world go round. Here are some resources for finding free photographs, video and music on the World Wide Web. Just, don’t breach any copyright laws, OK?

Movie Subtitles: OpenSubtitles.org is the “biggest multi-language subtitle database.”

Torrents: Torrents are “map” files you download to your computer that let you see and download different pieces of the file you want from multiple users simultaneously, which makes download rates much faster. All types of file are available, from movies to audio to programs and more. Search directly at The Pirate Bay or at ISOhunt.

Video: These have always given me the best results: Vimeo – Frontline – Google Video – Journeyman – The Hub – Metacafe – YouTube

Technological Know-How:

For when you’re bored, or Facebook is down, or your printer is blinking at you in a strange code, here’s how to find:

Blogs You Might Like: Google Blog Search is Google, but for blogs. Cool, huh?

Deleted Files: It’s not easy, but the instructions at this site helped me recover three years of documents.

Down Websites: If you want to know whether Gmail – or a number of other popular sites – are broken or just not working for you, visit DownRightNow to find out.

Instruction Manuals For Anything: These two websites mean you’ll never need to worry about throwing away an instruction manual again: Manuals Online, and Safemanuals.

IP Address: WhatIsMyIPAddress.com will let you know your IP address just by visiting the site, which could be useful for those interminable calls with technical support.