| Search Engine Help
If you
have not taken the time to learn how to search the net,
now is the time to do so. A little time
spent up front learning the basic principles, will more
than payoff in the future.
Search
Engines
There are
several search engines available and I am sure you
already have your favorite. Google.com,
altavista.com, yahoo.com and msn.com are among the top
ones used today.
You can use the techniques listed in this
article with each of these search engines and probably
most others that are on the net. It is important
to know that each engine can return different
results.
The reason – each website is submitted
independently to each search engine. Unless you
are searching for a rare item, this should not impact
you.
Search
Syntax
This may
seem confusing at first, but please take the time to
understand how the engine interprets your search. If you want to
search with one word, you already know how to do
this:
Or if you wanted to search for
computer support, you need to ask yourself this
question, “Do I want to return pages that have the words
computer and support next to each other?” If this is
the case you need type your search as
follows:
If instead
you wanted customer and support to be on the page but
they don’t need to be right next to each other, type
your search as follows:
Now that you
have seen how to perform a few basic searches, let's
dive into the explanation.
If you
want words to be together, they need to be in double
quotes (“). If you just want the words on the page you put a
plus symbol (+) in front of each
word.
To take
this one step further you may want to search with some
words together and some apart. For example, if
I wanted to search for free customer support, type your
search as follows:
Let’s say that after I run that
search I receive thousands of results and none of them
are what I was looking for.
Isn’t this
really what drives you away from searching? Too many results
to sift through! You type in your text and you spend the next two
hours sifting through pages that have nothing to do with
what you were looking for. Before you know
it you are heading to the medicine cabinet looking for
the strongest pills you can find to get rid of the
headache you now have.
The next
example is critical if you want to stay in good mental
health while venturing out on the net. Imagine that as
you start sifting through the pages, you notice a
majority of the results are offering support for Macs
while what you need is support for your PC. This is how you
would exclude pages that have MAC:
Don’t miss
what I am about to say here … I wouldn’t look at more
than 2-3 pages of results. Instead of
continuing to waste your time, refine your search. Chances are if
the first 30 had nothing to do with what you are looking
for, the next 30 won’t either. So go back and
change your search and get the results that you were
expecting.
Another
hint: While sifting through the results, pay attention
to the URL listed below each result. Why? Because the
engine may return the same site multiple times and if
you just visited the site, there is no reason to go
back.
How to
Quickly Search a Page
So you
have taken the time to enter your search text correctly,
making sure to use quotes, plus and minus symbols. Now, how do you
quickly evaluate each result the engine returned to
you? The
answer is right in front of you; no, really it is! Once you have
clicked on the result and the page has loaded, if you
can’t easily find the word you are looking for, hit
ctrl+f (or use the edit menu, then click find). This will bring
up a window that will allow you to find the text quickly
on the page.
Although this should not be an excuse to stay at
a poorly designed site where it is hurts your eyes to
even look in the general direction of the computer
screen.
Happy
Searching
Now off to
your favorite search engine to try-out these
techniques!
The best way to master them is to put them into
practice.
Once you have learned these techniques, the
internet will become indispensable and a pleasure to
use.
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