Search the Internet Better

Yesterday we gave you a brief introduction to search engines and how they work. When you search the Internet, there can be such a thing as too much information. Here are some simple tips that will help you find the specific things you’re looking for.

Use Quotation Marks

When you type more than one word in a search box, the search engine typically assumes that you also mean to type “and” and “or” in between those words. For example, if you search for soccer league, the search engine will pull up results for soccer league, soccer and league, and soccer or league. This means that the search engine will list web pages that include both your search terms together, as well as pages that have them separately. An easy way to narrow the search is to employ quotation marks in your search. If you apply quotation marks around the search “soccer league” the search engine will only display pages that have that exact phrase.

Location

As we just mentioned, searching for “soccer league” will bring up pages with that exact phrase. However, you will still get sites from around the world, and sometimes you need sites from a more specific location. If that’s the case, you need to add that location to your search. For example, if the information you want is about Canada’s soccer league, your search might now look like this: “soccer league” Canada.

Plus and Minus Signs

Using a plus (+) in a search tells the search engine that you only want search results with that specific word. For example, if I was looking for Windows security program Trend Micro, I could enter “trend micro” + Windows to make sure every result shown has to do with both Trend Micro and Windows.

The minus (-) sign does the opposite. A minus sign in a search tells the search engine you do not want any result with that word. For example, Trend Micro is also available for Mac computers. so if I want to get rid of the results with the word “Mac” I just enter “trend micro” - mac.

Keep It Simple

The simpler the search is the better your chances to get relevant information. Every time you add another word to a search, the search engine goes in another direction looking for sites related to that word.

Searching the Web is a situation where complete sentences won’t necessarily help you. You can drop conjunctions, articles, and prepositions—even capitalization—because they just get in the way of your search. “The” is one of the most used words in the English language. If you include it in your search—the winningest “soccer league” in Canada — you will bring up a ton of websites unrelated to your search. Food for thought: googling the word “the” by itself has more than 9 billion hits.

As you scroll through your results, remember that they are listed by relevance to your original search. The farther down the page you get, the less those results relate to what you’re looking for. If you click to the next few pages of results and don’t find what you need, it’s probably a good idea to go back to your initial search and rephrase.

Do you have favorite tricks for searching the Web? Let us know what they are in the comments below. We’d love to hear them!