We all use some sort of search engine to find the websites we are looking for with the information we need. Search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and more are vital to finding what you need on the world wide web. It doesn’t seem very complicated to go to a search engine, type in some search terms, and click on Search. And it’s not complicated. But if you know how to use a search engine, you can get better search results and that saves you time.
Here are some tips on how to use a search engine. For the purposes of this article, we are only going to talk about Google. Most of these tips are true for most search engines, although there are differences between them.
The first thing you should know is that almost every word you enter into the search box matters. There are only a few words that don’t matter. Those includes small common words like “the”, “a”, “for”, etc.
When entering your search terms, you should only enter words and numbers along with any special operators (we’ll discuss that later). Don’t bother entering any punctuation because most punctuation is ignored. When deciding what search terms to enter, think about how a web page might look and what it would say and enter words and numbers that you visualize being on that web page.
When entering search terms, the case of the letters doesn’t matter. So it doesn’t matter if you enter COMPUTER, Computer, computer, or CoMpUtEr. It also doesn’t matter what order the words are in.
When you search, the search engine looks for web pages that have all of the words you entered. So for example, if you searched for CEDAR PARK, it would return all of the web pages that have both the word CEDAR and the word PARK in them. But it doesn’t matter where those two words appear on the web page. As long as each one appears somewhere on the web page, it will be returned in the search results. This ends up giving you a lot of noise in your search results that you have to sift through. In this example, I get hits for Cedar Point Resorts, Cedar Point Amusement Park, etc.
If you wanted to only find websites where CEDAR and PARK were together in that order, then you would enclose those two words in quotation marks like this “CEDAR PARK”. To make your search results even more specific, you could enter this: “CEDAR PARK” TEXAS. Note that I am just using upper case to make it stand out. As mentioned earlier, case doesn’t matter. By entering your search terms this way, your search results will be more specific to Cedar Park, Texas.
How many times have you searched for something only to get a lot of hits in your search results relating to something that you aren’t interested in? For example, search for the word “JAGUAR” and you will get hits on an animal, a car, a football team, and a computer operating system. If you just wanted information on the animal, you could exclude a lot of the noise by excluding search terms like cars, football, and os (Apple OS X operating system), and more. You can eliminate some of the noise by excluding certain search terms.
To exclude something from your search results, enter a minus sign (dash) in front of the search term you want to exclude. So if you entered: jaguar –cars –football –os
You would get a list of web pages that have the word “jaguar”, but it would not include any web pages with the word “cars”, “football”, or “os” on them. You’ll probably still get some noise, but not as much. You can still use the dash, or minus sign, in the middle of words. For example, the words anti-virus and e-mail will work normally. It will only exclude a search term that start with a minus sign.
Google uses synonyms when searching. For example, if you entered childcare, Google will also search for child care (note the space between the words). If you search for Charles, you get results for Chuck too. For most searches, this is a good thing, but sometimes you don’t want all of the extra search results. Sometimes you are searching for something specific. In that case, preface your search term with a plus sign. So in the above example, you would search for +childcare. You would only get web pages with the word childcare. If a web page had childcare as two words, it would not be returned.
If you do a search on Google, at the top of your search results you may see where it says something like, “Did you mean …” If you get this, you may have a typo in your search terms or Google may think you meant something else. Look at the search that Google lists after “Did you mean…” and see if that is what you meant. If that’s what you wanted, all you have to do is click on it, and it will redo the search for you with the new search terms.
As mentioned earlier, when you do a search, it looks for web pages that have all of the words you entered. However, there may be times when you want to look for web pages that have this OR that. For example, let’s say you want to go to a dude ranch for vacation.
You could search for: “dude ranch” vacation
But many dude ranches no longer use the term “dude”. They call themselves guest ranches, so you might not get as many results as you would like. In that case, you can enter the following: “dude ranch” OR “guest ranch” vacation
This will give you any web page that has the word vacation and also has either “dude ranch” or “guest ranch”. Note that the word OR must be in uppercase or Google will think you are just searching for the word “or”.
This will give you any web page that has the word vacation and also has either “dude ranch” or “guest ranch”. Note that the word OR must be in uppercase or Google will think you are just searching for the word “or”.