Bill Myers - April 02, 2009

This week's tip is pretty simple. A way to quickly find things that might otherwise be hidden in plain sight.

Let's suppose you were interested in finding grant money for training others to produce video for the web.

You could do a normal Google search, and you'd likely end up with several million pages - none of which were exactly what you were looking for.

Or you could add two Google search modifiers, and you'd not only find that grants were available, you'd find the application forms for them.

Here's the search strings to use:

grant application video filetype:pdf site:org

and

grant application video filetype:pdf site:gov

By adding the search modifiers filetype:pdf and site:gov, you tell Google to only return .pdf files found on government sites that include the searched for keywords.

It is a simple trick. But it works quite well.

Give it a try. I think you will be surprised with what you can find.