Have you ever searched for something on Google, and gotten a bunch of unrelated results? As it turns out, many of us aren’t searching correctly. So what’s the right way to Google? Tom and Ray explain in this week’s Ask Deemable Tech.

Q: Apparently I am really bad at looking things up on the Internet. Recently I was trying to remember which country considered bats to be good luck. I searched for “country where bats are an omen of good luck” and couldn’t find it. My teenage son, however, found the answer in about ten seconds (the answer is China, by the way). What can I do to get make Google give me more useful answers?”

A: Great question Melvin! According to an article in The Atlantic Wire, even many knowledgeable tech people are “Googling” wrong.

We have a few tips that should improve your Google searches right away, but first let’s talk about the basics. What makes a good Google search term? Surprisingly, shorter is better.

When you search for “country where bats are an omen of good luck”, Google throws away about half of the words in that search. Google doesn’t care about articles like “a”, “an” and “the”, and it generally ignores prepositions like “where” and “of”.

What you really want to do is describe to Google what you are looking for in as few words as possible. We would start with searching for “bats good luck”. If you do that, the third search result down mentions Chinese folklore. Question answered! If that search doesn’t work, you can then try adding words.

Now here’s a trick that should impress even your tech-smart teenager. Say you wanted to find out information about the Tribal Law and Order Act, but you don’t want information about the various Law and Order TV shows. If you search for “Tribal Law and Order”, you’re probably going to have to dig through ten pages of Dick Wolf.

Try this instead: Google ?law and order -tv -show?. The minus sign tells Google to exclude whatever word follows it from the search results. If you do this, guess what? The very first result is the Justice Department’s web page about the Tribal Law and Order Act. No mention of the TV show at all.

And here’s another Google pro tip for you: did you know you can use Google to search inside any website? Have you ever been on a website that had a search bar at the top, but it just didn’t work very well? Or maybe you wanted to search a website that had no search bar at all. With Google’s “site search” option, you can easily find what you’re looking for on any site.

In the Google search box, type “site:” and then the web address of the site you would like to search with no spaces. After that you put a space and type the phrase you would like to search within that site for. So for example, if you wanted to search the Deemable Tech website for episode 12, you would type “site:deemable.com episode 12”.

If you want to learn more ways to improve your searches, Google offers an official online course on power searching. You can register for the class at powersearchingwithgoogle.com, and they run every couple of months (you can also watch videos of a previous class). Even if you think you’re pretty tech savvy you are certain to learn a lot and improve your Google Fu.

Ray may not have written Johnny B Goode like Marty McFly, but he almost broke the space-time continuum.

On this week’s episode of Deemable Tech, Ray creates a temporal causal loop by leaving a voice mail for Deemable Tech and answering it.Then, he and Tom answered questions about whether you can play 3D Blu-Rays discs on your HD TV, if can you delete a picture without deleting the picture, how to stop your Kindle devices and apps from synchronizing, how to Google better, how to extend the battery life of your cellphone, what order you should unplug your laptop in, and does Facebook owe you money?

All that and more, on this episode of Deemable Tech!

Make sure to subscribe to the show in iTunes by clicking here, or subscribe to the show in another podcast reader by clicking here. Also, make sure to leave us a review in iTunes. The more reviews we have the higher we’ll be listed in iTunes and the more listeners will see our show!

Need tech help? Got a problem or tech question about your computer, phone or tablet? Give us a call and leave us a voice mail at 1-888-972-9868, or send us an email to questions at deemable dot com. We’ll take the best questions and answer them on the show.

Links mentioned on this week’s show:

• PhotoAlbums+
• ?You Google Wrong? by The Atlantic Wire
• Inside Seach – Advanced Power Searching – Google
• www.fraleyfacebooksettlement.com
• AppGratis
• Apps Gone Free

Episode 28 – A Voicemail Causal Loop

Crowdsourcing an Answer

Ardis asked,

Dear Deemable Duo,
I’ve recently been having some issues scheduling D&D games due to the busy lives of my fellow dice rollers. I’m sure you find the idea of D&D players having lives as shocking as I do, but regardless, if games are to continue we need to find some way around this problem. I was wondering if there was any kind of program that might make it easier to coordinate our schedules? Not necessarily something that will show our full schedules but something that could let us see what free time we have in common or something to that effect. Thank you for whatever insight you might be able to give.

What do you recommend for Ardis? Leave your suggestion in the comments down below. Thanks!

Deemable Tech – Episode 20 – What’s Black and White and Read All Over?

On today’s episode Tom got all the laughs, and Ray got all the crickets. There’s bad jokes, good apps, bad smart phones, and an eagle going through a midlife crisis.

Make sure to subscribe to the show in iTunes by clicking here, or subscribe to the show in another podcast reader by clicking here. Also, make sure to leave us a review in iTunes. The more reviews we have the higher we’ll be listed in iTunes and the more listeners will see our show!

Need tech help? Got a problem or tech question about your computer, phone or tablet? Give us a call and leave us a voice mail at 904-372-DEEM (3336), or send us an email to questions at deemable dot com. We’ll take the best questions and answer them on the show.

Today’s Questions:

• Which is better? eReaders or tablets?
• How do I setup an external hard drive as a network drive?
• I want a small smartphone. What do you recommend?
• Why do I have to keep resetting my wireless router?

Debunkable

• Do eagles go through a midlife crisis, too?

Links we mentioned on today’s show:

• 10 of the best feature phones
• Gizmodo – After iPhone 5 the Only Small Phones Left Are All Horrible
• iPhone 4S
• Galaxy S III Mini
• Droid Razr M
• Glympse
• Medhelper
• TextGrabber
• Google Search App on iPhone
• Lifehacker – Why do I have to keep resetting my Wi-Fi router, and how can I fix it?
• DD-WRT – Linux based alternative OpenSource firmware suitable for a great variety of WLAN routers
• Snopes – Eagle Rebirth
• Truth or Fiction? Eagle
• Hoax Slayer – Rebirth of the Eagle Hoax