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!