9 Useful Google hacks to transform your #MediaMarketingLife

“How to write an ‘about me’ page?”

“Best banh mi on the Sunshine Coast?”

“Why does my dog do zoomies?”

From its humble beginnings competing with Yahoo! and Altavista (who dat?) to being the #1 go-to for our deepest questions at work and in life, it’s hard to imagine a world without Google…

We’ve loved sharing good hacks with you, as a fellow marketing and media professional.

When it comes to Google, here are a few of our favourites:

Hack #1 Use “quotation marks” for accurate search results.

For example, if you write “marketing strategy” you’ll only receive results with this exact term rather than “marketing” or “strategy”.

Hack #2 Use “site:” to find something within a specific website.

Googling “site: Urban List best coffee in Melbourne” provides a curated list of one of Australia’s most heated discussion topics.

Hack #3 Use “filetype:” to limit search results for a particular file type.

For example, “filetype: pdf business plan template” will save you from wading through pages of content and take you straight to what you need.

Hack #4 Use “define:” to receive a full definition for the word.

When you type “define: value proposition”, Google kindly provides us with “an innovation, service, or feature intended to make a company or product attractive to customers”.

Hack #5 Use an asterisk (*) and Google will help to fill in the blanks.

Having trouble remembering the quote (and who said it) that would be perfect for your client’s web copy?

By Googling “*if you’ve always done”, you’ll receive the quote “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got” – Henry Ford, Ford Motor Company.

Hack #6 Use tilde (~) to show synonyms.

For example, typing “media releases ~makeup” on Google will show a list of media releases across cosmetics, beauty, concealer, foundation, powder and many other words similar to makeup.

Hack #7 Use dashes (-) to exclude a term.

Trying to narrow the focus of your search?

For example, “let it go -frozen” will help you recall that it was James Bay that sang this song of the same title, without being inundated by the Disney version.

Now that we’ve found what we need, how do we keep it?

Hack #8 Reopening a closed tab

It’s happened to all of us.

We’ve trawled Google and opened 18 tabs of fabulous content, but then in our rush to access it, we accidentally click “X” and the whole page disappears.

Fear not! By right-clicking on the blank space in your tab bar in Chrome and then clicking “reopen closed tab” – it magically reappears!

This feature also remembers previous tab history, so if you right-click “reopen closed tab” again, it will open the second last page that you closed, followed by the third last page, etc.

Hack #9 Accessing your history across multiple devices

A whim of inspiration comes, and you excitedly open multiple tabs on your phone.

A few minutes later, you realise you need more screen space and it would be much easier to do on your laptop.

This is where our next hack comes in.

Located in the Chrome menu in the upper right-hand corner, click on the 3 dots (a.k.a. “the snowman”) to access History.

When you hover over History, a drop-down list of your most recently visited sites will appear.

When you click on History, you can see a detailed list of all of your visited sites, in chronological order.

Also, you can also access your “Tabs from other devices” (as long as you’re logged into Chrome under the same account).

By accessing your phone’s Chrome history on your laptop, you can carry on researching and writing interruption-free while your motivation level remains high!

This concludes our 4-part series on great hacks – we trust you got great value from them!

Missed the first instalment? CLICK HERE!

Missed the second instalment? CLICK HERE!

Missed the third instalment? CLICK HERE!