Save Time by Dashing Your Searches

Here's a little tip that saves me time and makes any kind of web searching go just a little faster.

I am a speed freak. So, I hate using the shift key. if i could write in all lowercase and get away with it, i would be a happy dude. Alas, I can't.

Usually, I will conduct a lot of phrase searches using quotation marks to link words. This produces better results. For example, I will search for "Mookie Wilson statistics" instead of just the phrase without quotes. Still, I hate this because I have to use the darn shift key. It's even worse on a mobile device. But leave it to me to find a trick!

You can create phrase searches on the fly using a single dash (-) between words. On most search engines, mookie-wilson-statistics will produce the exact same results as the phrase in quotes. That saves me a little bit of time each day. I've tested it on all of the big engines.

However, don't laugh. This tiny trick saves me lots of time over the years. Consider this. According to my Google search history I have performed a staggering 31,000 searches over the last two years since they added this feature. Many of these are phrases. Let's argue it's half of them. If I save 0.5 seconds thanks to the dashed-search technique and multiply it times 15,500, I calculate that I have saved 7,500 seconds. That adds up to 125 minutes or two hours! That means I saved at least an hour a year. Plus, that's not counting the tons of other searches on sites the Google history doesn't track.

Your mileage may vary but give it a try.