I just learned something over at GeekySpeaky.

You know how it is with Google. You do a search and get hundreds of thousands of results to sort through. It’s especially difficult if you happen to be searching for a common name. GeakySpeaky uses the example of looking up an ex-boyfriend who happens to have the same name as an 80s rock star. She also explains how to refine the search to get more accurate results for what you are looking for.

Let’s say you’re tracking down an ex-boyfriend, who happens to have the same name as a guy who was in an 80’s band. If you search for the boyfriend by name, obviously, you’re going to get tons of results that aren’t about the specific guy you’re trying to find. You can easily use the minus sign to remove things from your results.

So, in this example, we’ll say your ex is named Kevin DuBrow, which is also the name of the lead singer of Quiet Riot. (I attended a concert of his in 2001 which also featured Warrant and Poison, and Kevin Dubrow autographed my stomach after the show. Anyway…) When you visit Google, and put in the name Kevin Dubrow, you’ll get about 88,000 results. But since you know that your ex is NOT the Quiet Riot singer, you can cancel out results that also have that term, by doing this in the Google search box:

“Kevin Dubrow” -Quiet -Riot

That takes you down to 50,000 results! You could then add -album -musician -record to further filter your results. This is extremely helpful when you’re searching for a term that has 2 different meanings, or a person who has a famous double!

I had no idea you could do that. I thought I’d pass it along.

Happy googling ….