Learn how to search smarter

2006-08-04 | By: A. Lundgren | Comment on this article

In this guide we will look on ways to better use the potential of the search engines. Most searches are done by typing in a couple of words in the search engine page and hitting the search button. Although that method probably will help you find what you searched for most of the times there are a couple of really easy methods that will help you find what you're looking for
Find it easier with your favorite search engine!

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faster.

Most of the methods used in this guide could be used in one of the three largest search engines:

* Google - www.google.com
* Yahoo! Search - search.yahoo.com
* MSN Search - search.msn.com

There are also many search engines that are based on those three above, meaning that you could use the same search methods and that you'll get the same result. For example, AOL search is based on Google and AltaVista is based on Yahoo!

If you're using another search engine then the three mentioned above there are still a good chance that most of the methods used in this article will apply to the search engine u are using.

Basic search

When you go to a search engine and type in one or more search word in the search field and press the search button you'll get a list of result that match your search word(s) or search term as we will use trough rest of the article. Search term = One or more word that you used in the search engine.

The more words u use in your search the smaller the search list will be, but it will at the same time be a more precise result list. Meaning that hopefully you'll be able to find what you where searching for and nothing else. That's because the search engine only looks for pages that contain all the words in your search term.

So the more words you add to your search the better. But remember that search engines only search for a limited number of words, about ten, so if you use more than ten words it will only search for the first ten ones.

Typing in one or more words is often the only search that people do. And as mentioned above you could probably find what you're looking for using only this technique. But it will probably take a lot of time looking through the result list until you find what you're looking for.

So if you want to become a better "searcher" than a majority of the population just keep on reading, there are a few really simple ways to increase your efficiency.

Including small words

When you do a search and include very common words, such as "I", "how", "for", "it", "the", "of", "in", "is" and single digits, the search engine will ignore them and only search for the rest of the words in your search term. That's because they are so common that most pages got them and it would only slow down your search without doing any good to your result list.

Most of the time you don't need those common word, known as stop words, but there are times when they could be useful. For example: when you're searching for the title of a book or a movie like "The pianist". If you do an ordinary search with: the pianist. The search engine would only search for pianist and that probably would give you a lot of unwanted hits.

In the example above you could have added the word movie to the search terms and probably find what you were looking for. But there is a couple of ways to search for stop words as well. The first and most useful one is the phrase search.

Phrase search

Phrase search is when you put your search terms in between quotation marks. The search engine will then search for pages that have all words (even stop words) from your search term and in the exact order as you typed them. So if you search for "fight club" you'll find information about the movie Fight Club, but you won't find information about a club named Club Fight.

The other way to include stop words is to use the plus sign (+) right before the stop word. So a search for +the pianist will find all pages with both "the" and "pianist" in them. It's useful when you don't want to specify a special order of the words.

Excluding words

You could also do searches that exclude certain words. It can be very useful when you want to search for words that are associated with other words. For example, if you where to search for information about pirates from Caribbean you would probably get a lot of pages about a certain movie.

If you add a minus sign (-) right before the word that you don't want included the search engine will only find pages that doesn't contain the word with the minus sign before it.

So if we search for pirates caribbean -movie we'll only get pages without the word "movie". It's an effective way to rule out pages with information about the movie. The minus sign could also be used before phrases. So if you want to find pages with one person and without another person you could do a search like this "Jessica Simpson" -" Nick Lachey".

Either one

You can do searches where you search for either one of two words (or more). That is done with the OR keyword. For example if you want to find pages about poodles or bulldogs, you could search with poodle OR bulldog. You could also include other words like this breeder (poodle OR bulldog) to find breeders for poodles or bulldogs or both.

Wildcard

When you want to search for a phrase that you don't remember all the words in you could use a wildcard instead of the word(s) you don't remember. For example, if you want to find out who wrote the famous phrase "to be or not to be", but you're not sure which words there where in the middle you could use wildcard like this "to be * not to be". That search will find phrases like "to be or not to be", "to be and not to be", "to be banana not to be" and so on. You can include the wildcard on several places in your phrase.

Searching with numbers

This function will only work in Google out of the three search engines mentioned above.

You could search for result containing numbers in a specific range. This could be useful if you want to search for information between two dates or find a product in a specific price range. You do so by adding two numbers separated by two periods (no space) in your search terms.

If you where to search for information of California between 1800 and 1900, you could search for California 1800..1900. If you want to buy a Volvo for $2000 to $3000 you could search for Volvo $2000..$3000. It can be used for a lot of more than years and prices like weight (50..80 kg).