Someone put together a list of Google search features you might not know about. Are you familiar with these helpful functions?

1.  Hyphen searches.  If you put a hyphen in front of a word, it excludes results with that word.  The example Google gives is the phrase “jaguar speed,” followed by a hyphen and the word “car”.  (“jaguar speed -car”)  So, how fast the animal is, not the car.

2.  Tildes.  They’re the wavy dash thing.  If you put one in front of a word, it also searches for synonyms of that word.  So something like “music classes” . . . with a tilde in front of “classes” . . . will also look for music “lessons” and music “coaching.”

3.  Searching specific sites.  Start with the word “site”, then a colon, and the URL for the site you want to search.  (For example, “site:olympics.com figure skating“)

4.  Searching for different file types.  There’s a dedicated “image search” button, but you can also specifically search for things like PDFs and MP3s.  Just start your search with “filetype”, followed by a colon.  (“filetype:”)

5.  Asterisks.  If you don’t know a word, put an asterisk in there.  It’s useful if you don’t know the name of a song but know SOME of the lyrics.  For example, “falling down like [asterisk] into [asterisk]” is vague.  But Google knows you probably mean “like pieces into place” from the Taylor Swift song “All Too Well”.