Google Synonym search - How it helped me today

2 points

16 years ago

This post basically describes how i spent my last 10 minutes. The take away from the post below is that you can search for a lot of stuff on Google using ~ when you don't know actual keywords and how the search on all the websites should be.

##Story - Start I saw an article on HN a few weeks back with a chart that described various stages of a startup. I wanted to see the article again and so I began searching... The only things I knew about the article were that It was about how we should avoid not jump from one idea to another and instead focus on one at a time.

- My first query on Google was: "why i don't take up new ideas". It definitely did not work as none of the articles on first page were what I was looking for. - I thought that may be I should look for keywords (even though I did not remember any of them). So I start with the word "Idea". Yeah, it was a bad idea... - Then I added more keywords: "idea" "optimism" "investigation" "uninformed". I knew that the article used these words or their synonyms but I was not sure of the exact words. - I had seen the article in Google Reader so my next try was to search there with different combinations of these. That didn't work either as the search never looked beyond the titles for articles posted on HN.

Finally, The solution that worked:I had seen some time ago, the use of "~" in Google search. It searches beyond keywords by looking at synonyms etc. And so I used it by searching for "~idea ~optimism ~investigation ~uninformed"(without the quotes). And that is how I found the article I was looking for. ##Story - End

Article: http://www.businessinsider.com/entrepreneurs-resist-the-sirens-call-of-exciting-new-ideas-2010-8

Details about ~: http://www.google.com/help/features.html#synonym

As a side-note: I am amazed at how powerful searching controls on search engines have become but on the other hand how much other places lack a proper way to search.