A Google search comes up in our mind whenever any question comes up in our minds. Not just that, but people search anything in Google, from looking at pictures of kittens to the recipe for making bagels. But what if there was a way to make the search even better and more precise? There are some Google search settings that most people are not aware of and it would help them a lot to tweak these changes. This article will teach you exactly that.
There is a difference between the settings you can access from your browser. This is the Google search settings which means it is only for your search request and has not anything to do with the browser. What does that mean? If you are using Google Chrome, desktop, mobile or tablet doesn’t matter, you can see the three dots on the upper right corner of the window?
Towards the end of the list when you click it is the option for “settings”. Those are the browser settings which lets you change the search engine, manage passwords, theme, notifications, languages, and other browser-related settings. Search settings are different and cannot be accessed via this route.
How to access Google search settings
To access the search settings in Google, go to the address bar or the search bar and search for just the term “Google”. Or search for anything and click on the Google logo on the upper-left side or the top. This will lead you to Google’s homepage, just like the old days. This is where you’ll find the search settings. Pictures have been added for assistance.
On the bottom-left area of this page, you’ll see “setting” sitting at the corner. This is applicable for all the browsers including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc. Also works on mobile browsers. So here’s how and what you can change about your Google search. There are six options in there, but only two are worth focusing on; Search settings and Advanced search.
Here are the things that you can change to improve your search results:
SafeSearch filters: excludes all the sexually explicit content from the search result page such as pornography, etc. Great for people who have preteens and they are getting ready to explore the other side.
Results per page: Useful if you want to see more than ten results without turning to the next page. You can have even 100 results on one page (it’ll be slower).
Private results: Turn this on if you want more personalized results. Personalized means that if you search for a cafe, Google will use your location data to check all the nearby cafes. It even looks at your calendar and events to personalize the result. Note: This means that Google has access to your data so if you don’t want to share that, turn it off.
Spoken answers: If you ask a question on Google using voice search, the results will be spoken to you by Google. Great for visually impaired people.
Where results open: Turn this feature on if you want every search result to open in a new tab. Handy if you want to read from multiple sources.
Search activity: This feature manages how Google serves the search results to you based on your previous search activities. So if you searched for how to make a chocolate cake, the next search will predict that you’ll look for flour, even if you type just “fl”.
Region setting: This is the most interesting one. You can manually select which geographical region you want your search results to be. And the search results vary a lot. Coming back to cooking (because I am on a diet and very hungry at the moment of writing this), if you want to make croissants, search results from France will be better than search results from America.
Advanced Search
Advanced search is a much more detailed search option in Google. Instead of typing just a phrase or terms in a normal Google search, advanced search lets you put multiple keywords, specific numbers, options to include and exclude some words in a particular language, region, etc to get a search that is laser-focused and precise.
These were the settings that you should tweak to get a better search experience in Google. We hope this article was helpful. You can always revert the search settings and these settings are not global. This means that the setting is applied only on the specific browser. This concludes the article.