General
Join or sign in
Sign in to save your progress and earn a certificate
Welcome to the 'Top tips for finding what you want with Google search' video course. In this video, you'll learn how to do a Google search by asking a question instead of just typing a word or phrase. You can ask Google any question that you can think of, and the questions can be quite complex.
From the Google home page at google.com, click in the search bar and type, 'Which native Australian tree is easiest to grow in a Sydney garden?'. It's important to include all the words in the question, but you don't actually need capitals or a question mark on the end. Press Enter to view the search results.
The search results show a mix of information and shopping sites. It also includes a section titled 'People also ask'. You can click a question for more search results and click it again to close it. Right at the top of the search results page, you may see an AI Overview. This summarises the most popular results from a range of sources and presents them in an easy-to-read list. Click Show more to reveal all the results. For our question about growing native trees in Sydney, it shows a list of easy-to-grow trees for Sydney gardens.
On the right-hand end of each line, you can see a small link icon. If you click this, the search result that the AI Overview took its information from displays on the right. You can then click this search result to visit its web page and get even more information. For this demonstration, however, we'll click the cross at the right of the search bar at the top of the page to clear the text and get ready for a new search.
An AI Overview does not always appear and is an experimental feature, so results may not be accurate. Be careful to check results against other sources. There are some handy shortcuts you can use to have Google answer common questions.
For example, in the search bar at the top of the page, type weather and your postcode to get a local weather report. Try typing 'time' and then the name of a city to see the current time in that city. This is a useful search when you need to call someone overseas. You can type 'define' and then a word to see a dictionary result.
And you can make your browser work like a calculator by typing in a maths question. If your keyboard doesn't have a multiplication sign, you can use an asterisk.
You've learned some top tips for finding what you want with Google search so you can get more useful results. If you're unsure about any steps, you can rewind the video or click the chapter headings to jump to the start of a chapter. If you're ready to move on, there are many other courses to explore on Be Connected.