Cleanse, Tone, Defrag: Minus and Plus

In the early days of CTD, I put out the call for readers to submit their tech problems if they so wished and I’d feature their problem and subsequent solution the following week for all to see while getting back to them personally beforehand . Well that didn’t really happen, but it also kinda did late last week in a roundabout way on Tumblr. Yes, I have a Tumblr now. Tumblrs are cool and I do mean that without quoting Eleven.

A mate on there asked whether it was possible to filter out certain websites from a Google search; a way of omitting and honing the desired result to return exactly what he needed.

Well to prepare to freak the geek out because I’m about to make with the lesson.

You know those two little buttons to the left of the backspace? Yeah, the minus and plus. Did a light bulb just flash above your head? It really is as simple as using them in your search to narrow down or bring certain results to the fore.

 
Minus

Okay, so my mate’s problem was validating a quote but when he’d Google to fact check, he’d get everyone and their Nan’s Tumblr in the mix. So this is what you need to do:

your search query -the name of the website you want to omit from the search

Example: doctor who -tumblr

Hit return and that’s it. You can type in just the name of the website like seen above, or you can type in the address (-tumblr.com). Whichever your preference, you must ensure that there is no space between the – and the name/address otherwise the search engine will just read it as a hyphen.

 
Plus

Yep, you’ve guessed it; just replace the – with a + if you want the search to bring a certain website to the front of the returned results.

your search query +the name of the website you want to focus on

Example: doctor who +tumblr

Again, remember there mustn’t be a space between the + and the name/address or else it won’t work.

Brace yourself because that’s not it: you can do combos in the same search. You’ll have to apologise to your other-half and or cleaner for the mind-blown-mess on the carpet.

 
Combo

So you want to find something, but you want to omit a certain website from your search while focusing on another in particular.

your search query -the name of the website you want to omit from the search +the name of the website you want to focus on

Example: doctor who –tumblr +denofgeek

Insanely awesome, no? With this one, it’s the same deal as the other two with one exception: make sure that there’s no space between either the – or the + but a space between the two filters.

 
So simple yet so incredibly effective, and a surprisingly unheard of method of searching the web. Now you can feel all cool and smart and stuff like you’re Chloe from 24 whenever someone asks you to Google something: “I’m narrowing down the search parameters, what else do you want me to do? Get my M16 out and shoot the wrong results. Here you go, now excuse me; I need to go have a loud whispered phone call just out of earshot but not out of.”

Oh, and FYI, I didn’t make my mate for the answer wait until reading this the following week. Not that evil. Well…