So you, like us, are probably watching anxiously for the iPhone 5. You’re wondering how to cut through the incredible load of rubbish that’s popping up on Google News – multiple re-reports of the same stuff, baseless rumours, spam and nonsense – and get to the meat of the story.
Here’s a quick primer on how you can use Google’s search syntax to cut out stories you know you’re not interested in. For example, today it’s being reported that Al Gore, on the board of Apple, has mentioned that Apple will be launching “iPhones” next month. This adds nothing to the news you’ve already read about the launch date, iPhone 4S and iPhone 5 rumours via AllThingsDigital earlier in the week, so you want to exclude Mr Gore from your search results.
So, you can search – in Google News – for
iPhone 5 -“al gore”
The minus symbol will ensure it excludes all sources that reference Mr Gore.
You can add as many search exclusions as you like to cut out other irrelevant or uninteresting stories speculating on the basis of nothing (which is what make up the majority).
You might also get frustrated with one of the several spammy sites that’s materialised to capitalise on search traffic around the iPhone 5 that Google hasn’t got around to delisting from its Google News Sources database. You can do that by specifying:
iPhone5 -source:www.spammyiphone5site.com
And, if you’re frustrated with International reports that you’re not that interested in (although this probably isn’t massively helpful as most of the people with genuine insight into this story seem to be in the US and China or Taiwan) – you can specify location:
iPhone 5 location:uk
Best yet, you can combine these all in endless combinations to weed out rubbish and get to the meat of what’s being reported that might actually be of substance. So,
iPhone 5 -“al gore” -source:www.spammyiphone5site.com location:uk
And so on.
So there you have it – either learn Google Search Syntax – or, better yet – keep following us here on Coolsmartphone and we’ll bring you the news (and semi-founded rumours) as they come…