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You can watch the video of this post at the end.
Google has many hidden features. Hacks you could call them, hacks that you’re your life a lot easier. Let’s take a look at some of those hacks. More specifically: hacks that will help a marketer’s life a bit easier.
Researching
Let’s start with some hacks that help you do research a little bit better.
Books by…
Are you a marketer that is trying to learn more? Just like we all want? And you are someone who likes to read books? In that case Google can be a very nice resource for finding books about a topic, but also specifically from certain authors.
Do a search for “books by [authorname]”, and chances are you will not just find Amazon results, but specific information delivered to you by Google about the author:
Keep updated by Google
We all know Google alerts, but did you know about being updated in Google Now? If there is an author, an influential, a client or someone else you would like to keep updated about Google has a nifty feature.
Google the persons name and when there is knowledge Graph information about the person there is a chance you can get updates about them in Google Now:
(though to be fair, Bryan really needs to update his picture there 😉 )
Founder off…
Are you looking for more information on businesses you are targeting or want to use as a reference? And you want to make it personal? Try searching for “founder of [businessname]”. If the Knowledge Graph is in place you will find relevant information on the founder:
Note that again you can again get updates on the person and if you click on the arrow you will get more information.
Search a website
This one will be familiar with many search marketers. You can search a specific site. So, are you interested in all articles about education of State of Digital? Simply search for “Education site:www.stateofdigital.com” and you will get the related articles from google:
Related
Are you looking for websites which are similar to ones you know already, but you can’t seem to find them easily? Welcome Google. A search for “related:www.website.com” will give you websites which Google believes are similar to the one you know:
OR
Looking for events in your niche but you only want to go to events in certain cities? An easy way of filtering these out is doing an “OR” search. By typing the word “or” or using the “|” key you can show results with only the choices in it, like for example the search “digital marketing events London or Amsterdam”:
Filetypes
Are you looking for presentations? Or pdf’s about a specific topic? Try searching using filetypes. Do a search for example on ‘[topic] filetype:ppt’ and powerpoint presentations around that topic will pop up:
Useful
There are also some hacks which are just useful for, well just useful:
Have you been here before?
Some pages you visit more often. But if you are like me, you don’t always remember which sites you’ve checked before. Luckily Google can help you remember. If your personalized settings are on, Google keeps track of the pages you visit. And it tells you when you do a Google search and a page shows up that you’ve visited before:
Note: this is not always accurate because it depends on both your settings, the cookies taken and the search that you do, but sometimes it’s a handy feature.
Time zones
Working with different time zones? Sometimes you quickly need to know what time it is somewhere else. Just ask Google:
The fun ones
And then there are the fun ones. Google has a lot of easter eggs hidden in the search engine. And some of them are just plain fun ?.
Play a game
Are you sick of working? Why not play a quick game, like Pacman. Search for “Pacman” and you can play right there in the SERP:
What to eat for lunch?
Finally, everybody has to eat. Even marketers. But are you not sure what you should have for lunch, a burger or pizza maybe? Why not compare them in Google:
And what about your hacks?
These are just a few hacks which can be useful, but we would love to know more, so tell us please: which hacks in the SERPS do you use most, and which ones have we missed?
Watch the video of this post:
Now, go try out the 12th one:
Use Google Translate to bypass a paywall…
Ran into a page you can’t read because it is blocked or paywalled? Here’s a quick trick (doesn’t always work, but often does!):
Type the page into Google translate (replace the example with the page you want):
http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ja&tl=en&u=http://example.com/
How about that!?
Like this 12th trick? Tell others they need to look for this trick on our page: https://www.stateofdigital.com/search-hacks-marketers/
Or Tweet: Found the secret 12th one!