When you type in a search term using Google, MSN, Yahoo or other search engines, how many pages of results do you sift through before you find what you need? Most of the search engines on the Internet use special characters to yield better search results, but many people do not know about them. In this series of articles you’ll find incredibly helpful search engine tips that will permanently change how you search the Internet. They’re guaranteed to save you lots of time and unleash the Internet’s resourcefulness.
Novice Internet searchers always gawk at the number of search results produced by search engines. Who has time to sift through 2.5 million search results? That number of search results is actually not a good thing. You need to learn how to modify your search strings to produce more relevant results.
The first tip for getting more out of search engines is to simply put quotations around the exact phrases you want to find. This is called phrase searching. It’s one of the most effective techniques for improving your search results. Obviously, this won’t change search results for a single word, but it will improve searches for 2+ word phrases immensely.
Look at these examples:
If you entered: mountain climbers club, search engines would return results for the words mountain, and climbers, and club, regardless if those terms appeared next to each other or not. Try it in a search engine and see for yourself (or, just click here). You’ll see many over a million results for web pages that have any ONE of those terms in them. When you search for multiple-word phrases (without the quotes), you receive results for any one of those words in any order or by themselves.
Now, take the same search terms, and put quotations around the entire phrase, like this: “mountain climbers club” and see what happens (or, just click here). The search engines return a few thousand results where all the words in the phrase appear exactly do within the quotation marks, and the order of the words is preserved.
When you are looking for specific information and have only limited time, would you rather look through a million pages, or just the top-ten from an effective search? There are many search engine tricks and tips this series of posts will share.
