Use Google Wildcard Searches To Find Relevant Information

February 29, 2008 | By Monika Mundell | Comments Off

When searching for goodies on Google we can often find some amazing information. I’m the kind of person who uses Google a lot. When I need info on my writing assignments Google is where I go to find it. Yes, I’m aware that Technorati and Del.ici.ous are also great platforms on which to find relevant information.

One nifty trick that has allowed me to pull some great PDF’s, is to use a PDF wildcard search. To do this I go to Google and insert the word pdf followed by a colon and the keyword I’m targeting in inverted commas. The inverted commas are there to eliminate all unrelated content and minimize what’s left to the most appropriate searches.

The results will return many PDF’s that are related to my search. You can see this on the next image. If you look closely at the URLs you’ll see that most of them are PDF’s.

While scrolling several pages on these kind of results I often come across some really good ebooks. This is especially useful when we are looking for inspiration on a new project or even writing an ebook ourselves.

But wait there is more

Another Google wildcard search I just learned from a good friend is using the *. Doing wildcard searches using this as part of a sentence will return a range of interesting results.

The results clearly show stuff that is related to what people might think about. With a bit of fantasy this simple Google wildcard search could give you exactly what you are looking for.

Next time you struggle to find information you need try a Google wildcard search and see what you’ll find instead.