Google’s search results are generally quite good by default, but customizing the results can make them even better. Google provides several options for doing this, which appear along the left side of the search results page. These work best if you’re signed into a Google account.
The top group of options filters by the type of content. These are Images, Maps, Videos, News, and Shopping. News is useful for finding news about current events. Shopping is great for price comparisons. Click More for more options such as Books, Places, and Recipes.
Click More search tools at the bottom of the list to show these options. You can filter results by when they were published. This is useful when you’re looking for recent information, because you can filter out old pages.
Click Personal to show content from your friends, or Nearby to show content from your geographical area.
Click Verbatim to search for the exact words you searched for, without any personalization, spelling corrections, synonyms, etc. If you're signed in to your Google Account and have Web History enabled, click Visited pages to restrict your results to pages you’ve previously visited.
Finally, if you don’t see what you’re looking for, try clicking Related searches to see results for searches similar to what you typed.
Find more about these and other Google Search results options at Google: Search results options and tools.
